I 



I 



$1.'^. 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 



THE 



HEART OF CHRIST. 



EDMUND H. SEARS. 




" It is seldom borne in mind that without constant reformation, that is wit 
stant return to its fountain-head, every religion, even the most perfect, nay the most 
perfect on account of its very perfection more even than others, suffers from its contact 
with the world, as the purest air suffers from the mere fact of its being breathed." 

Max Muller. 



^ BOSTON: 

NOYES, HOLMES, AND COMPANY. 

117 Washington Street. 
1872. 



^4- 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by 

NoYES, Holmes, and Company, 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 

StEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 

H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



PREFACE. 



" 'T^HE fourth Gospel is the Heart of Christ," is the 
-L enthusiastic language of Ernesti, from whom we 
borrow the words of our title-page. Expositors both an- 
cient and modern, who regard the four Gospels as veri- 
table history, have generally manifested the same pref- 
erence. " Written by the hand of an angel,'' says Herder ; 
and Schleiermacher, who with his school delighted in " the 
mystic of the four Evangelists," says that his soul must 
have been pervaded by eternal childlike Christmas joys. 

But sentiments of admiration are not evidence to other 
minds who do not find through John those depths of living 
water which those who are more contemplative have ever 
found. No book has been the subject of a more search- 
ing or a more adverse criticism than the fourth GospeL 
The history of the controversy, with the motives of it, is 
exceedingly interesting and instructive, and I had sketched 
it in two chapters of this work, but was obliged to omit 
them in order to bring the volume within convenient size. 
It is the controversy of half a century between some of 
the ablest theologians and profoundest scholars. The his- 
torical evidence was first seriously assailed by Bret- 
schneider in 1820, who then published his ** Probabilia," 
and who contended that the author of the fourth Gospel be- 
longed to the first half of tl]e second century, and wrote it 



k 



IV PREFACE. 

with a dogmatic purpose, namely, to propagate the doc- 
trine of the deity of Christ. He was ably answered, and 
the only change which the whole discussion then produced 
was a new value placed upon the Gospel of John. Bret- 
schneider himself retracted his doubts. 

But the Critical Philosophy, dating from Kant, and 
running by a swift and irresistible logic into Pantheism, 
gave birth to a new school of Biblical criticism ; a criti- 
cism vastly more ingenious than the old rationalism, and 
wrought of finer threads than it had ever spun. It finds 
its ablest expounder in Ferdinand Christian Baur, an 
Hegelian of the left wing, that is, the pantheistic, who 
breaks up the whole New Testament Canon, and runs it 
anew in pantheistic moulds, fortunately with the calmness 
and the icy clearness by which his style is distinguished. 
He furnishes Strauss, we think, with all the ideas and 
arguments which a Christian believer would care to no- 
tice or answer. Whatever we say of his criticism, and 
the philosophy that determines and inspires it, his three 
works, the History of the Christian doctrine of the Trin- 
ity, of the Atonement, of the Christian Gnosis, place the 
student of Christian history under immense obligations. 

Where learned men have disputed, unlearned men are 
apt to think there must be hopeless uncertainty. They do 
not remember that when learned men dispute with theo- 
ries predetermined, their disputes are only the play of 
hypotheses, and that the verdict of the common under- 
standing is better than theirs. That the hermeneutics of 
the Tiibingen School are a dance of this sort, is shown by 
the constant shifting of its positions and its mutually 
destructive theories. There was a pre-determination to 



PREFACE, V 

make Christianity serve as a mould of Pantheism with its 
nomenclature unchanged. 

Meanwhile as the dust of the controversy clears off, the 
calm wisdom of Neander, who put in a plea for entire 
freedom of debate, and who saw what the result must be, 
becomes apparent. No one went into it with a spirit more 
sweet and beautiful than his. To his name must be added 
a list long and illustrious, to enumerate which would be 
to suggest works of learning and scholarship, the most 
profound and reverent of this age or any other, especially 
in the departments of Christian history and evidence. 
Never was it more signally shown how great is the service 
of doubt and denial in rendering faith and affirmation 
clear, pronounced, and intelligent. Not only the sand 
was cleared away, disclosing the old foundations more 
deeply and broadly, but new facts were brought to light, 
and new fields discovered, running down like sunny glades 
through opening mist to the Personality w^hich the Chris- 
tian ages date from. The result is that by the verdict of 
the best scholarship of modern times not predetermined 
to Pantheism, no facts of equal antiquity, judged by the 
reasonable rules of historical evidence, stand out in surer 
prominence than the fundamental facts of the New Testa- 
ment narratives ; no heights of history thus remote lie 
on the horizon in mellower sunlight or clearer outline. 
Among the names in this great debate of half a century, 
whether disclosing the external grounds of Christianity 
or its divine contents, are, along with that of Neander, 
Ullman, Dorner, Tholiick, Schaff, Julius Miiller, Giesler, 

Olshausen, Jacobi, Hengstenberg, Bunsen, and Tischen- 
dorf. 



VI PREFACE, 

It is not in my plan to write a book of Christian evi- 
dences merely, but to evolve the contents of the Johannean 
writings, which clearly apprehended are their own evi- 
dence, and prove Christianity itself a gift direct from above 
and not a human discovery. But the exposition would not 
be at all satisfactory, especially after past discussions and 
denials, if we left out the historical ground of the fourth 
Gospel, or left it to be suspected that this ground had 
been shaken or disturbed. We shall see that this has not 
been the case. Indeed, it is very difficult to make a sharp 
line of division between external and internal evidence, 
and show where one shades off into the other, as much as 
it is to tell where the soul and body are joined together. 
Brought home to us in their all-reconciling power, the es- 
sential truths of the fourth Gospel imply and necessitate 
the form and covering in which they appear ; or conversely 
beginning with their historic basis, the evidence grows and 
brightens all the way inward to the central light which 
shines out, encircles, and irradiates the whole. 



CONTENTS. 



PRELIMINARY. 

PACK 

I. The Supernatural • 3 

II. Miracles . . . . . . . . . .16 

III. The Immanence of God .32 

PART I. 
THE HISTORICAL ARGUMENT. 

CHAPTER 

I. Gnosticism 39 

II. Saint John at Ephesus 51 

III. The Johannean Writings 64 

IV. The Scope, Purpose, and Spirit of the Apocalypse 91 
V. The Witnesses of the Second Century . . 112 

VI. The Witnesses of the Second Century . .131 

VII. Christianity as a New Influx of Power . . 165 

VIII. The Pause in History 184 

PART II. 
HISTORIC MEMORIALS. 

I. The Four Gospels in Organic Unity ... 197 

II. Jesus of Matthew is the Logos of John . . 220 

III. The Mystery of Birth 226 

IV. Nazareth 239 

V. The Forerunner 247 

VI. The Homes of Jesus 255 

VII. Jesus in the Desert 266 

VIII. The Last Meeting by the Jordan .... 285 



Vlll CONTENTS. 

PART IIL 

THE PRIVATE MINISTRY OF JESUS. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

1. The Wedding at Cana 295 

II. The First Visit at Jerusalem 304 

III. The Second Visit at Jerusalem . . . . 319 

IV. Removal to Capernaum . . . . . . 328 

V. The Third Visit at Jerusalem ... . 338 
VI. The Fourth Visit at Jerusalem . . . .352 

VII. The Fifth and Last Visit at Jerusalem . . 370 

VIII. The Night of the Last Supper . . . .379 

IX. Calvary ......... 387 

X. The Reappearings of Jesus 394 

XL The Person of Jesus Christ 404 

PART IV. 

THE JOHANNEAN THEOLOGY. 

I. The Cosmology of Plato 415 

II. Its Character and Influence . . . . . 429 

III. The Johannean Cosmology 442 

IV. The Transparencies of Nature .... 456 
V. The Word made Flesh 467 

VI. The Logos Doctrine 484 

VII. The Johannean Atonement . , ; . . 501 

VIII. Converging Lines 512 

IX. The Thrones in Heaven. Conclusion . . 525 

APPENDIX. 

A. The Easter Controversy 537 

B. The Birth of Christ . 544 

C. The Preexistence 546 

D. Personality and Personification .... 550 



PRELIMINARY. 



" It has always happened that in the ranks of the scientific army 
some have been found who refuse to credit the marvels which obser- 
vation is continually revealing on every hand. Despite all the known 
wonders of the universe the circumstance that the sole available inter- 
pretation of observed facts involves some surprising conclusion, is 
held by such men to be a sufficient reason for rejecting the observa- 
tions of the most trustworthy. The value of scientific observation 
seems enhanced in their eyes precisely as its fruits are insignificant." 
— R. A. Proctor. 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 

A LL the great religions acknowledge at least two 
-^^^ ranges of existence. This material plane of 
being which we apprehend by the organs of sense, 
we must believe in, as it nourishes and enfolds us 
from our cradles. No one ever denied it. Philoso- 
phers dispute about the essence of matter ; about 
what is behind these natural phenomena, and whether 
anything at all ; but no one denies that the phenom- 
ena themselves exist. Those who deny the existence 
of matter only deny that it exists in itself, or in other 
words that it has any substratum of its own. The 
world of sight, sound, and fragrance that lies over 
against the senses and through them becomes an 
object of perception, is believed in alike by peasant 
and philosopher, and this by common consent we call 

NATURE or THE NATURAL WORLD. 

In this natural world there is nothing stable. All 
is mobility and change. Not only the animal and 
vegetable life on its surface constantly disappear and 



4 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

reappear, but the rocks become disintegrated and 
enter into other forms of existence. Going back 
through longer reaches of history we find that the 
oceans and the mountains have been subject to vast 
changes by subsidence and upheaval, and that the 
aspect of the earth is transformed from one epoch 
to another. The very same elements by changes of 
combination produce the most diversified forms ; and 
the minerals, the waters, the forests, the flowers of 
the field and the winds that blow over them, are those 
same elements commingling by new affinities . and 
proportions, giving the endless ebb and flow which 
we delight to witness around us in the sea of matter. 
Man himself is involved in these perpetual revolu- 
tions. He appears on the surface of nature, is dom- 
inated by it through the stages of his threescore and 
ten, and then melts into its bosom and disappears. 
The order of sequence, according to which all these 
changes take place, we call by universal consent the 
LAWS OF NATURE. To discovcr these changes and 
recombinations by patient observation or by subtile 
analysis is the business of science ; to group them in 
their class and order and so determine their law of 
sequence is the business of natural philosophy. 

The Christian believer acknowledges another and 
higher range of existence. Nature, we $aid, discharges 
man from her keeping and domination, and all that 
the senses knew of him dissolves and recombines in 
her earths and ethers and flowers. So one hundred 



THE SUPERNATURAL, 5 

generations have passed away since Christ appeared 
upon the earth. More than three hundred genera- 
tions have come and gone since the creation of man, 
all of whom nature nursed on her bosom and then 
received back their crumbling forms and sent them 
anew into her unending circulations. The number of 
human beings then who exist at this moment on the 
surface of the earth, compared with those who have 
existed, is only an insignificant fraction of that whole 
which we call humanity ; only as a single page of one 
great volume ; only as the last cluster of leaves that 
flutter in the great forest that has shed its foliage. 

If man lives only within the conditions of nature 
and is only returned into her endless circulations, 
then the natural world is the only one that exists to 
him, and he may expect to know of nothing beyond 
its phenomena. But Christianity affirms that when 
nature quits her grasp upon him, he still lives on, that 
only his visible coverings dissolve and recombine 
with the natural elements, while the man himself 
emerges beyond her sphere, subject no longer to her 
conditions and laws. It follows, of course, on the 
Christian theory, that the three hundred generations 
of human beings whom this natural world has dis- 
charged from its domination are still alive and active. 
Hence Christianity affirms a sphere of life above 
nature, more vast and more thronged with people, 
and whose empire is ever enlarging, since the stream 
of existence has discharged its immortal contents for 



6 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

more than six thousand years into those endless 
abodes. 

This higher range of existence is called by common 
consent the supernatural, because it is above the 
dominion of natural law. This is what men generally 
mean when they speak of a supersensible or supernat- 
ural world. This preeminently is the sense appre- 
hended by Christian faith when it transcends the 
sphere of natural change and sees the things that are 
invisible. Every one has a right to make his own 
definitions, but he is bound consistently to abide by 
them when made, and not confound things eternally 
distinct in themselves. 

The word nature doubtless is made to have other 
significations, and indeed passes through an extended 
range of secondary meanings. We sometimes speak 
of the nature of man as meaning the whole aggregate 
of human qualities which make him what he is. Then 
again we discriminate and speak of his physical, in- 
tellectual, and spiritual natures. One who is disposed 
to play with words may call all beings and things 
from the mineral up to the highest angel created 
7zattireSy and then by this definition he may deny that 
there is anything above nature except God Himself. 
Or he may follow up this game of words yet farther. 
Cicero writes a treatise, " De Natura Deorum,'' and 
we speak familiarly of the Divine nature, meaning the 
sum of Divine qualities and attributes ; and one who 
should be so disposed, and could afford the time for 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 7 

such logomachy, might place all beings and things, 
including God Himself, under the category of nature ; 
and then of course it would be very easy for him to 
prove that the supernatural has no existence. 

Plainly nothing is gained by these tricks of lan- 
guage. The words nature and sicpernaturaly or the 
nature-world and the spirit-world, whether put in 
contrast or correlation, have a meaning fixed and well 
apprehended in the popular judgment, and we gain 
nothing but confusion when we try to disturb it. 
Herein moreover the popular judgment and the most 
philosophical are in perfect agreement. With both 
alike, the nature-world is this range of existence con- 
ditioned by time and space, and subject to the laws 
of space and temporal change ; whereas the range of 
existence conceived as out of time and space, and 
therefore beyond the dominion of natural law, is the 
supersensible or supernatural world. Thus Kant uni- 
formly discriminates these two spheres of being, 
— nature, the realm of sensible phenomena condi- 
tioned by space ; and a cogitable world above space 
defecated of sense and free of natural law, and there- 
fore supersensible and supernatural.^ 

Of these two ranges of being thus discriminated, 
how they are related and how contrasted, which is 
the substance and which the shadow, there is an 
immense divergence of opinions and beliefs. By the 

1 See chapter iii. of Semple's Metaphysic of Ethics ; or see Kant's 
Kritik of Practical Reason^ passim. 



8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

Christian theory man is the connecting hnk between 
them. He lives in both. He is the child of nature, and 
at the same time the heir of immortality. But that 
is first which is natural, and afterward that which is 
spiritual. He is born with only a natural conscious- 
ness, and the heavy wrappages of sense become the 
first basis of his existence. -He is involved in nature, 
and he may even pass through all her transformations 
from the infant to the man, with hardly a dream of 
aught else than the natural life. Then the supernat- 
ural will be to him a phantasy and a chimera. He 
may honestly deny its existence altogether. Domi- 
nated by sensible appearances what more strange 
than to suppose a man can be alive after he is dead ? 
Beyond sense the imagination " stretches out the 
stones of emptiness," and to think of that infinite 
vacancy as our final abode, or as capable of yielding 
a revelation to us out of its eternal silence, is to such 
a man the most hideous of all absurdities. Men have 
lived and passed away from this plane of being with 
no belief in any other, simply because none^other than 
the natural consciousness was awakened within them ; 
or, in other phrase, because they only lived and died 
as natural men. 

Just removed from this state, and rising out of it, 
are the first faint dawnings of the supernatural, the 
first guessings and gropings towards it. But as yet 
it is apprehended only as dim and spectral. Thus 
the ghosts of Homer live in the underworld depleted 



THE SUPERNATURAL, g 

of all that fresh and throbbing life which they lived 
on the earth, and are described as the fleeting shades 
of what they were. What a contrast between the 
Greece that flourished on the sun-bright hills and 
plains and breathed her transparent ethers and de- 
veloped into graceful and glorious manhood, and the 
Greece of her spirit-world reduced to its pale and 
ghostly existence, and pining for terrestrial air ! Not 
yet did the common mind or even the minds of the 
poets themselves come to any practical faith in the 
Supernatural. For with individuals and peoples not 
yet evolved from the despotic grasp of nature, this 
world is the substance and the other is the shadow. 
Removed somewhat farther from sensuous unbelief, 
and indicative of a higher intellectual culture than 
blind instinctive gropings, is that faith which comes 
from the deductions of the reason but which refuses 
to affirm aught else than the simple fact of the super- 
natural. This is the position of Kant, who declines 
to accept the doctrine as the gift of revelation, but 
only as his own conclusion from a well-constructed 
syllogism. He does not pretend to prove it with 
" apodictic certainty," and he protests that we have 
no right to envisage it to the eye of faith, for then 
we fly ofl* among the chimeras of the fabulists and 
poets. We must cogitate the supernatural and de- 
scribe it only by negatives. It is the absence of 
nature ; it is spaceless and timeless ; it is the perfect 
defecation of all sensuous life, and beyond this, says 
Kant, the reason has no right to go. 



lO THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

* 

A more full and aflfirmative faith than this is quite 
conceivable. It is conceivable, that is, that the su- 
pernatural may not only be believed in as the result 
of a syllogism and a balance of probabilities, but may 
be envisaged to the eye of faith ; that man no longer 
involved completely in nature but evolved in part 
from her despotic grasp, and having a higher con- 
sciousness clearly and divinely opened, may be so 
brought front to front with super-sensible realities 
that their gleaming ranks and far-dissolving perspec- 
tives shall lie on the soul as brightly and surely as 
Nature does on the organs of sense, and that the 
consummation of our religious faith and Christian 
culture shall give us, the supersensible world the 
eternal reality and Nature its feebler adumbration, — 
that the sun-bright substance itself, and this the mov- 
ing shadow projected on the dial-plate. 

But is there any probability that such a disclosure 
as this will be given to mortals ? Let us see. 

Once admit the simple truth of man's immortality, 
and how vast and far-reaching are the conclusions 
that flow from it ! How dull and laggard are our 
minds in coming up to the reality ! There are to-day 
about a thousand million human beings upon the 
earth. At the end of a year, twenty millions will 
have passed away from it and twenty millions new- 
born will have come in their places. Hundreds are 
going and hundreds coming while I write these sen- 
tences. In less than fifty years, a number equal to 



THE SUPERNATURAL, 

the whole thousand miUions will have put on immor- 
tality, and an equal number will have filled up the 
earthly ranks thus broken. The successive genera- 
tions that have passed on within eight thousand 
years, the time during which man has probably been 
an inhabitant of the earth, would number by a mod- 
erate computation, one hundred times a thousand 
millions of people. This great multitude, moreover, 
are our own kith and kin ; our brethren elder born, 
whose hearts have throbbed with the same passions 
and yearnings and aspirations. And unless the 
mighty prophecies that go up from our collective hu- 
manity are a mockery and a lie, unless the groan- 
ings of the creation and its travailings in pain fail 
eternally of deliverance, then that great company of 
these uncounted millions who aspired to a better 
state, have had their hopes fulfilled ; have risen to 
an existence which has been brought into nearer 
communion with the Divine, and been enriched and 
ennobled by being freed from our earthly incum- 
brance. How immeasurably then in height, in 
breadth, in dignity, and power, does the supernat- 
ural transcend the natural ! And when we speak of 
humanity only as pertaining to the race on earth, 
how do we narrow down the conception and de- 
grade it ! If those uncounted generations of men 
and women have not been disrobed of their human^ 
ity by death, but if on the other hand it throbs with 
a diviner love, then the pulses of their being still 



12 THE FOURTH. GOSPEL, 

beat in harmony with ours as one family of the living 
God, and like God Himself, are nearer to us on the 
spiritual side, because there are no walls of flesh 
between us. 

" But then our concern is only with the practical ; 
with our duties here upon the earth, and our fellow- 
beings who share with us its trials and sorrows. We 
must relieve the burdens which we can touch now 
and here, and not follow our imaginations into realms 
which are uncertain and remote." 

Only with the practical ! Do we become practical 
only by bending prone and working mechanically 
with our hands, without any faith to inspire our in- 
dustries and turn them to works of love or alle- 
luiahs of praise } Does the practical consist only in 
finding the swiftest methods of locomotion in the 
barter of commodities, in changing money, and in 
handling dirt.? And when you speak of our fellow- 
beings as part of the great orb of humanity in which 
we are all insphered and involved, must we think of 
it only as it rounds outward and downward among 
Africans, Patagonians, the Chinese, and the Esqui- 
maux ; or must we think of it also as it rounds 
upward into light, and expands in those continents 
vaster and more densely peopled which He in a 
broader and warmer sunshine from the eternal 
throne } 

" The burdens which we can touch now and 
here ! " What were the burdens which lay on the 



THE SUPERNATURAL, 1 3 

minds of the two thousand of our fellow-bemgs who 
have died since I began this chapter an hour ago ? 
What are the burdens on the minds of the three 
hundred and fifty thousand whose feet are now 
stumbHng on the last verge of mortal existence 
which they will quit forever before eight days have 
elapsed ; whose failing eyes look for the twinkle 
of some star in the darkness of the infinite Be- 
yond ? What are the burdens on the minds of the 
twenty millions who are crowding after them and 
will follow them before the year has closed ? What 
are the burdens now and everywhere on our toiling, 
hoping, and aspiring humanity, conscious of the 
rapid changes of time, and groping for a foothold 
on the solid floors of eternity ? They are not bur- 
dens which any " practical " man can touch unless he 
has stood himself where the clouds have been rifted 
above him and disclosed those higher and broader 
continents reposing in the peace of God. 

" Our concern only with duties here on the earth." 
Yes, — but very possibly a view from the earth's 
illumined summits rather than its hollows and flats 
will show us what those duties are. Some centuries 
ago the philosophers thought that this earth was the 
centre of the universe and the most important part 
of it ; the sun, moon, and stars being lamps for phi- 
losophers to see by. Even Plato thought the earth 
was the first and oldest of the sidereal gods, and at 
the centre of the axis of the Cosmos regulating the 



14 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

movement of the whole. They did not imagine that 
the earth, and the whole solar and planetary system 
to which it belongs, were but the lackeys of vaster 
systems which wheel them at will through the fields 
of space, and that the radiance of our brightest sum- 
mer s day would be but a dimly lighted candle in the 
near presence of those monarchs of the skies whose 
thousand-fold blaze would turn us to ashes if it were 
not cooled and softened by distance. Very possibly 
it may be found in like manner when the sphere of 
our knowledge rounds upward as well as outward and 
downward, that it will show us relations and harmo- 
nies of which before we had never dreamed ; and that 
we should find the supernatural realms of being run- 
ning into the natural, and controlling the latter with 
attractions and repulsions which we should be much 
wiser and better for knowing. Who shall decide be- 
forehand and deny the probabilities as to whether 
the Divine Providence will openly disclose to us 
those supernatural realms where our humanity is 
glorified, compared with which all our little day on 
the earth is but the prologue of a mighty drama ! 

Once admit that man is immortal, and that death 
is only a physical change, and we shall find that 
many of the fallacies of naturalism are speedily dis - 
pelled. Naturalism, for example, scouts the idea of 
a " personal devil" as one of the chimeras of super- 
'stition. But personal devils have trod the earth for 
ages. What is the essence of deviltry but the inver- 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 1 5 

sion of the powers of man, turning them against God, 
against society, and against humanity. What but 
this has gendered the wrongs, the murders, the cruel 
oppressions which have afflicted the world ? Men 
who incarnate deviltry here leave this world by the 
hundred every week simply by dropping their mortal 
coverings. If death has not extinguished their being, 
it follows by the plainest and shortest logic that the 
personality of the devil, whether individually or in 
the complex, is one of the stern facts of the universe 
both on its mortal and immortal side, and that those 
who deny it slide into the very superstition which 
they charge upon orthodoxy, viz., that there is some 
moral magic in death-beds to change sinners into 
saints. Possibly when the supernatural shall disclose 
itself as that other hemisphere of our humanity, where 
it culminates continually, we shall find that our ascetic 
and our blindfold theologies alike will have their su- 
perstitions sifted out of them ; and that to split the 
universe by a horizontal line and leave the natural 
below to itself, is to leave it to bewildering fantasies, 
or, what is quite as bad, leave it to gravitate heavily 
into dust and mire. 



11. 

MIRACLES. 

A LIVING writer defines a miracle thus : " An 
-^^- event inexplicable from the effect and concur- 
rence of finite causes ; which appears as the in- 
working of the supreme infinite cause, or God, for 
the purpose of proving to the world God's nature and 
will ; especially of introducing a Divine Messenger, 
of holding him to life, guiding him in his work and 
authenticating his credentials with men ; this divine 
wonder-working so shaping itself as to operate through 
the messenger as a power conferred upon him once 
for all to bear witness concerning Him ; its efficacy 
connecting itself with an appeal to God on the part 
of the wonder-worker, so that God Himself on his 
account breaks through the chain of natural events 
and lets the supernatural come in." The writer cites 
alleged examples of such Divine interference : the 
miraculous birth of Christ, his exceptional childhood, 
the scene at his baptism, and his ascension. ^ 

A most lame and lumbering definition, implying 
all through that miraculous power is one superim- 
posed from without, standing apart by itself, as in 

1 Strauss, Leben Jesuftir dar deiUsch Volk bearbeitct, p. 146. 



MIRACLES, 17 

some sense hitched on, not rather the exaltation of 
the faculties themselves under the action of universal 
laws, natural, spiritual, and divine. 

We hold this definition utterly unwarrantable from 
any claims which Jesus ever made in his own behalf, 
no way applying to the events cited or to any facts 
of the New Testament, practically false and philo- 
sophically absurd. If God is immanent in nature and 
in man, and the supernatural is involved in the nat- 
ural, there can be no such thing as "interference" or 
'' breaking through." Nature is the perpetual efflores- 
cence of the Divine Power ; the natural is the unbroken 
evolution of the supernatural ; history from the first 
man to the last is the progressive unrolling of the plan 
of the infinite Providence in which great events and 
small are taken up and glorified. Who but an atheist 
doubts '^ the inworking of the supreme infinite cause." 
And who but those who ascribe the authorship of 
nature to a mechanic and not a Creator, believes that 
this inworking is exceptional and not universal, inter- 
mittent like the winding of a clock and not freshly 
creative every hour } Who among the myriads of 
messengers which God has sent into the v/orld, ever 
came without being "introduced" and "authenti- 
cated" by the Divine power operating through Him 
and passing into works that bore witness to his 
message t 

A miracle, as we apprehend it, is exactly what is 
implied in its etymology, — a surprise. It is an event 



1 8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

SO unlike anything in our previous humdrum and 
shallow experience that we cannot group it under 
any law of sequence, and so it stands forth as a 
wonder. If a child who had never heard the thunder, 
were caught in the field by a tempest and involved 
in a blaze of lightning, he would think '' the chain of 
natural events " broken through, and very likely be- 
lieve as they did in the childhood of the race that 
God had spoken from the clouds. The white men 
told the Indians that on a certain day and hour the 
sun would hide his face, and the earth at mid-day 
be covered with darkness. The hour came and the 
darkness came ; the Indians fell on their faces in 
terror and worshipped the white men as endowed 
with supernatural knowledge. A man who had 
been dead four days opens his eyes and rises from 
his coffin, and strikes dread into the standers-by. 
A young woman dying at Naples, describes a wed- 
ding scene exactly to the life and at the moment of 
its occurrence in the dear old home across the Atlan- 
tic, hears delightful music perceived by no one else, 
looks up and exclaims, '' How beautiful ! " and passes 
away from earth. What is the work of science but 
to group all the miracles in the natural world under 
the laws of matter, and what is the work of philosophy 
but to group all other miracles under laws intellectual 
and spiritual } 

Law is simply the order of sequence which governs 
all phenomenal changes, whether in the realm of 



MIRACLES, 19 

matter or the realm of mind. When we say that the 
laws of nature or of spirit are " uniform/' we mean 
not that they give a monotonous sameness through 
all the centuries, but that the same antecedents being 
given the same consequents will be given also. Like 
causes under like conditions will be followed by like 
results. If I planted corn last year and reaped the 
harvest, I have a right to expect that the same seed 
this year, in the same soil with the same culture and 
the same climatic conditions, will produce the same 
harvest again. But if the harvest should totally fail 
this year while all the antecedents appeared the same 
as the year before, it would be sheer stupidity in me 
to imagine that the chain of natural events had been 
broken through and not rather that some of the 
antecedents had eluded my intelligence. The con- 
sequents I can cognize, for they stand out palpable 
before me, but what conceit must that be which 
claims to cognize all the antecedents which lie hid 
in the secret laboratories of nature, which run back 
to the birth of time and into the unknown eternities 
themselves 1 

If by " the uniformity of the laws of nature " we 
were to understand only an unchanging series of 
phenomena repeating itself age after age, coming 
round and round in the same cycles, we should have 
a theory of the creation utterly belied by the facts 
of the case. Looking out from our little moment in 
time, and our little mole-hill in space, we might per- 



20 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

haps affirm this kind of uniformity, for the seasons 
revolve, and even and morn alternate now just as our 
fathers and grandfathers had described them. But 
how was it in that period before the seasons began 
their flowery circuit ; before Day lit up its solar splen-' 
dors, or Night quenched them with cooling shade ? 
How was it when our earth hung in space as a mass 
of molten lava, or when the seas covered its whole 
surface boiling hot and void of organic life, or when 
the Laurentian hills peered above the surface and 
lifted slowly their drenched and solitary heads above 
the boundless waste of waters, the first born children 
of this habitable world ? ^ Looking back, not through 
our own little day, but through nature's periods and 
cycles, we see her moving not in a " uniform series," 
but RISING WITH SPIRAL MOTION from lowcr to higher, 
never repeating herself, never completing one circle 
except on a loftier plane than the previous one, and 
toward which all previous ones were the .prophecy 
and aspiration. The Positivists will have it that tem- 
poral change succeeding to temporal change, phe- 

1 What we call " the New World is in fact the Old World," says 
Agassiz. " The Western Continent was the earliest upheaval ; and the 
first land that peered above the waters was not the highest mountains, 
which are of later date. Along the northern limit of the United 
States, bordering upon Lower Canada, there runs a low line of hills 
known as the Laurentian Hills. They are insignificant in height, but 
the earliest land that lifted itself above the waters. The earliest forms 
of organic life may now be studied along what was then the beach of 
an almost boundless sea." — Geological Sketches^ chapters i. and ii. 



MIRACLES. 21 

nomenon antedating phenomenon, exhausts the idea 
of causaUty, thus affronting our intelHgence with the 
doctrine that the effect can rise above the cause into 
a new and loftier series. For if nature herself gives 
us instead of a monotonous circuit in the same 
grooves, a constant movement out of them into 
higher ones from indistinguishable chaos through 
the ascending scale of life and order up to man, the 
majestic coronal of all, then when we speak of the 
" uniformity of nature " we only talk foolishness for 
the purpose of blinking the glories of the Godhead, 
immanent in phenomena and authenticating all their 
vanishings and reappearings. 

A miracle is a surprise, — but to whom ? Not to 
higher intelligences who see the interiors of nature 
and know what is about to be from the unbroken 
\ links of the ascending series ; not to Him who fills 
those interiors with reality and floods them with his 
life ; but to us who see but one link of the chain ; who 
are ignorant of the long line of antecedents and who 
stand where the result first breaks upon human sight. 
An eclipse was a surprise till the laws of planetary 
motion were discovered and revealed it in accord 
with the harmonies of the spheres ; the first advent 
of man on the green earth was a surprise to the 
brutes below him ; the first angelophanies to men 
were a surprise to the infant race, and every Divine 
epiphany on a higher plane than a previous one, 
which should date a new dispensation or a new 



22 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

cycle of the endless years, would be at its com- 
mencement a surprise to the subjects of it, whether 
angels or men. But what dullards must we be to 
stare into the heavens and declare the laws of the 
universe broken through simply because we could 
not see those infinite antecedents and their unimagi- 
nable consequents, which make up the supreme 
order of the creation whereby it ascends and reflects 
the Adorable Perfections with nearer and brighter 
refulgence ! 

The changes of a single day are miracles to the 
ephemera that swarm into existence and die between 
sunrise and sunset. Supposing them endowed with 
some sort of puny intelligence, what a surprise it 
must be to them when they emerge from the surface 
of the water and bathe their wings in light; when 
the wind sweeps them from the air ; when they ex- 
pire in the sun's last rays and the three hours that 
span their insect life are closing ! The changes of 
the four seasons are miracles to the tribes that live 
and perish in their annual revolutions. The transit 
of the earth from one epoch to another is miraculous, 
seen from our finite or merely natural side of things. 
Every new epoch transcended all the experience of a 
former one, and came upon it as a surprise. The 
shell-fish of the silurian beach, if they could have 
thought and spoken as expounders of naturalism, 
would have treated as incredible the first rumors of 
four-footed beasts and creeping things, for would not 



MIRACLES. 23 

mollusks and bivalves have been to them the finale 
of this lower creation, not buffaloes and stags with 
antlers ? And then the mammals of the tertiary 
period, who inhabited the green earth and cropped 
its herbage alone for unknown ages, would have 
been equally surprised when man came as the lord 
of all. As if quadruped existence and not biped were 
' not conformable to all experience, and the highest to 
I be conceived or desired ! As if any other were not 
, anomalous and monstrous and a " breaking through " 
I of the laws of nature ! And the new race of men, 
looking from the natural side only, ignorant of aught 
I else than their own short epoch of a few hundred 
years, might perhaps claim themselves as the last and 
i highest evolution of Divine energy ; and if by some 
I ,new epiphany a style of life not animal, nor human 
merely, but essentially Divine, should appear upon 
the earth with attendants and environments tran- 
scending all past experience, and inaugurating a new 
series of years and centuries, they might very likely 
think the order of the universe disturbed and its 
laws broken through, and try to sink the fact from 
its appropriate rank, and shut out the solar splendors 
of the Godhead. 

What can be more childish than to make the ex- 
perience of what has been the measure of all that 
shall be ? And yet this is the whole pith of Mr. 
Hume's argument against miracles which Strauss 
has served up anew as unanswerable. The alleged 



24 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

facts of the Gospel narratives — the birth of Christ 
from no human paternal line, his exceptional child- 
hood, the angelophanies that attended him, his heal- 
ing diseases by his touch, his raising the dead, his 
own resurrection and ascension — are unlike any for- 
mer experience, and therefore incredible. They are 
violations of nature's laws, and cannot be proved by 
testimony. The answer plainly is, How do you know 
the laws of nature except from phenomena ? And 
whether such phenomena have taken place is the very 
question in hand. If they did take place, they are 
consequents palpable to the eye, but whose antece- 
dents belong to the infinite laws of order which you 
cannot measure, since they are out of sight. The 
same consequents were never given before because 
the same antecedents were never given. If we are 
told that Jesus raised the dead, and restored the blind, 
and walked -the waves, the credibility of the alleged 
facts will depend altogether upon the question. Who 
was Jesus } and that again must be decided by the 
amount and quality of moral and spiritual power with 
which He moves upon the world, and possesses and 
changes the heart of humanity. Behold the man, and 
look before and after, and then say. Does he inaugu- 
rate a new epoch ; is here a transition period in the 
ascending Divine series } Is here a new Divine 
epiphany through the interiors of nature whereby it 
ever rises and becomes the more transparent type 
and robe of the Divine Wisdom, Love, and Power } 



i 



MIRACLES, 



25 



If SO, we may well expect it will have some attend- 
ants and environments which belong not to any fore- 
gone history, — just as the sun new risen gives 
shapes and colors to the breaking and purpling clouds 
which they never had under the colder and feebler 
lustre of the morning star. 

If a miracle is that which " lets the supernatural 
come in," what are all the on-goings of nature but 
miracles, unless we take the position of blank athe- 
ism ? They are the continuous enunciation of some 
vast intelligence, which is a perpetual wonder, be- 
cause it transcends our highest thought and compre- 
hension. The highest significance of the miracles of 
the New Testament consists mainly in the fact that 
they show more entirely the control of mind over 
matter, or the sovereignty of spiritual volition in nat- 
ural things. The same is verified in our experience 
every time a muscle moves at the touch of a human 
will, and more divinely and grandly whenever a new 
phasis of nature evolves freshly the volition of God. 
The worl^ of Jesus which '' let the supernatural 
come in," are after the analogy of all human works 
in which mind is plastic over matter, or in which the 
higher subordinates the lower. The difference is that 
in Jesus Christ, as the New Testament describes 
Him, there was a degree and quality of spiritual 
power, such as we do not find in ourselves nor in 
people around us, and therefore the subordination of 
external nature was more signal and complete, and 
breaks upon us as a surprise. 



26 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

Law, seen from the Divine side of things, is not 
the order of sequence which governs the phenomena 
of days and years only, but of the ages and cycles 
of endless existence. Even if it be true, as some 
theorizing astronomers tell us, that the planetary 
orbits are growing less, and that the travellers of the 
heavenly spaces must one day mingle in the solar 
fires out of which they came, who would doubt that 
the grand winding up must be as much under the 
laws of the supreme order as the folding up of a flower 
at evening ; preparatory for a new unwinding of the 
system of nature ; of its higher and sweeter efflores- 
cence out of the immanent life of God and a more 
sublime procession of the heavenly travellers on their 
endless way ? 

A miracle is a surprise, — but to whom ? To 
those, of course, all whose habits of thinking have 
been formed within narrower boundaries, or on a 
lower plane of existence than the one which the mir- 
acle breaks open to their gaze. Plough into the earth 
deep enough and turn over the furrows, and the 
earth-worms writhe in their distress, brought too 
suddenly into the light and air. So with us when a 
higher realm of truth breaks upon us too suddenly. 
There are habits of culture which only develop the 
natural mind ; that is to say that order of the facul- 
ties which hold us in close relationship with the nat- 
ural world. Those faculties may be sharpened to an 
indescribable keenness, till the intellect penetrates 



II 



MIRACLES, 27 



outward into space and do\NTiward towards the 
monads, and imagines that the mysteries of the uni- 

( verse are well-nigh solved. A man, perfected exclu- 
sively in this sort of culture, never thinks of the uni- 
verse as more than one story high. A whole people 
lliior a whole period of time may be educated mainly 
to habits of natural thinking. The progress of the 

■collective human mind is not on a narrow and 
straight line ; its progress is like that of a noble ship 
jEreighted with the wealth of all the zones, but which 
tacks to every gale and makes a broad belt that 
ripples the whole surface of the sea. The ancient 
supernaturalism was without science, one-sided and 
baseless, and so running into driveling superstitions. 
It must always be so when the supernatural is not 
complemented by the natural, or does not rest upon 
its solid floors. For the last two hundred years, the 
van of discovery has led the way down deeper and 
deeper into sense, till the great verities of immortal- 
ity seem like a floating and vanishing tradition, and 
miracle is synonymous with monster. The supernat- 
ural, no longer evolved in the disclosures of an irre- 
sistible Providence, is left very much to those who 
knock at the closed doors or rap out responses upon 
tables. Meanwhile, it requires small gift of prophecy 
to foretell the result. As surely as the supernatural 
rests on the natural as its solid flooring, so sure 
is it never to fall through, but gain security by all 
the explorations of natural law. As surely as body 



28 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

involves spirit, and the natural world involves and 
exfigures the spiritual, so surely is the most perfect 
knowledge of natural law to become the ground of 
a supernaturalism reformed, illustrated, and purified 
of old superstitions and errors. The age has veered 
so far senseward that we may conclude it has touched 
its boundary line. There are indications that the 
tacking and veering towards the opposite quarter 
have begun already, and the only apprehension is 
that the refluent wave may be too sudden and vio- 
lent. That we are on the verge of a new epoch 
when the Spirit of God will utilize the accumulated 
knowledge of the modern age, taking up science, art, 
philosophy into a higher unity, there to make them 
resplendent with a light which is not their own, and 
the servitors of a more comprehending and adoring 
faith, there are tokens already both in the earth and 
the sky. And in that day, when the supernatural 
and the natural, no longer halved and sundered, are 
harmonized in one, we shall find the latter the me- 
dium through which the other appears more per- 
fectly ; and then special miracles will cease only 
because the whole cosmos is miracle, and more 
intelligently and completely than to the eye and ear 
of Plato reports the mind of the Supreme and the 
music of the upper spheres. 

The tendency of our modern thought has been to 
narrow in the domain of miracle, and finally enclose 
it by the boundaries of Palestine and the first and 



MIRACLES, 



29 



last decades of the first century. Within that little 
province of earth and in that Long Ago you may be- 
lieve miraculous power was adjoined to a few men so 
as to enable them to prove certain doctrines of re- 
ligion, and especially the resurrection and the future 
life. Ever since all demonstrations from a higher 
world are to be ruled out as pretense and imposture 
touching on the special domain of the New Testa- 
ment. Meanwhile the small space of earth and the 
small fragment of time made sacred by miracle, re- 
cede in the dim and vanishing past, and become alto- 
gether spectral to the natural common mind ; and so 
the idea of the resurrection and immortality belong 
to the speculations of ancient days. And in what 
way has this growing skepticism been prevented from 
eclipsing the faith of mankind altogether } 

The personal history of those who have been 
caught up nearest to the heart of God would perhaps 
show that the disclosures which Strauss calls " inter- 
ference," have never ceased in any age of the world. 
Miracle, — regarded as that inner and open door 
where " the supernatural comes in," — always has 
been and always will be. Its form and its methods 
may change as the world changes, but the substance 
and reaHty are preserved. Just in the degree that an 
age becomes shut in by sense, the sphere of miracle 
is withdrawn from the gaze of the street and the 
market-place, and from all physical demonstration, 
to that realm of spirit, where only the heart of God 



30 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

beats audibly to the heart and ear of our redeemed 
and regenerate humanity. He will not strive nor 
cry amid the coarse dissonance of earthly sounds, 
only to be rejected and scorned. But the work of 
the Holy Spirit in the spiritual nature of man, 
melting through its depravities and evolving a new 
creation out of its primal chaos, giving to it ever 
clearer openings, — this has been the miracle wrought 
ever anew through all the Christian ages. Said 
Jesus to the people who were amazed at his power 
of healing the sick, Greater works than these will 
the Father do that ye may marvel ; referring to that 
life whose throes were already commencing in the 
spiritual graves. Those who have been caught in- 
ward by the Spirit of God and sealed by its power, 
will often tell us, not aloud, but in tears and in trem- 
blings, lest the world outside should hear and laugh, 
of the guidance of a Divine hand never out of sight, 
and the mouldings of a Divine power more wonder- 
ful than that which projected the forces of nature. 
The moral creation, though rising unseen to carnal 
eyes, is quite as miraculous as the natural. It is very 
interesting, sometimes, to hear not only individuals, 
but families, recount their history ; how events have 
been shaped and unified by tractations which none 
but they could see ; how mountains have been re- 
moved, and brazen bars cut in two, and victories 
achieved in answer to the prayer of faith ; how amid 
conflicts and temptations and the clouds of dust 



MIRACLES, 31 

which have risen over them in the race of life they 
have had tokens of the power that insphered them, 
tenderly moving behind a veil lest its too great glory 
should drown their human personality, yet making 
rents here and there where watching faces looked 
through ; above all, in those hours of supreme trial 
when families break up and the last adieus are 
spoken, seeing the gates flung wide, where the steps 
lead away from earth and mortality into climes where 
death shall be no more. When science looks upward 
instead of downward, and becomes transfigured in a 
light higher than its own, and sees all its facts taken 
up and rearranged under laws of a wider and more 
comprehending unity, the earth will reflect the peace 
of heaven and mirror its verities anew, repeating, 
though on planes of existence vastly broader and 
more secure, the times of which Wordsworth sings, 
when the Divine Messengers crowning the sovereign 
heights of the world — 

" Warbled for heaven above and earth below, 
Strains suitable for both/' 



III. 

THE IMMANENCE OF GOD. 

T F, as Christianity assumes, man while involved in 
-^ nature and clothed in its forms, is at the same 
time intrinsically immortal, and as such is to be 
evolved out of nature and rise above it, it follows 
that he is the subject now and here of both ranges 
of existence. He is natural and supernatural. By 
his natural organs he is placed in open and neces- 
sary relations with time and space ; by his immortal 
faculties he is placed in necessary relations with a 
supersensible world. He is not always conscious of 
these higher relations. The babe is locked fast in 
sense and knows only of sensuous things. There 
are those, we have said, who scarcely in this life get 
released from this despotic grasp. But a spiritual 
nature with its unmeasured possibilities, is in abey- 
ance, securely enfolded, and ready under the appli- 
ance and culture adapted to it to open down into the 
consciousness and arouse the soul to aspirations and 
reachings towards what lies beyond nature and is in- 
dependent of her growths and decays. Hence the 
involution of the supernatural in the natural and the 
immanence of God in humanity. On the first awak- 



THE IMMANENCE OF GOD. 33 

ening of a consciousness, higher than that of mere 
natural life, all men have intuitive notions of spirit- 
ual and divine things. Then into every soul comes 
an influx of the supernatural, and breathings from 
the Lord, which are deeper than all human teachings, 
and without which all human teachings were in vain. 
Our minds open inward as well as outward, and 
thence run along into our souls as on electric wires 
the tidings that are not of earth ; inspirations of God 
of a moral law and of a life to come. Were it not for 
these inspirations, the eternal life might as well be 
preached to trees and animals as to human beings. 
Granted Mr. John Stewart Mills'*theory of "associa- 
tion " and cumulative traditions ; they must have 
had a clear solid ground to start from, a native stock 
to be grafted upon, or they might just as well have 
started from the coral or the oyster as from a human 
soul. There was at the beginning the involution of 
the supernatural in the natural, else we might teach 
and preach to all eternity and get no evolution ; 
there must be the immanence of God in man, and he 
must be capable of becoming conscious of it, else we 
might just as well offer symbols of worship to the 
bats and owls as to men and women. With all alike 
this is the prime ground of culture, from the first 
bishop of Christendom to the half idiot savages of 
Sidney Cove. These divine instincts, therefore, pos- 
sible or actual, are in every man ; for every man as 
to his interior mind belongs to a spiritual world and 
3 



34 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

is capable of being placed in communion with eternal 
things. But let us discriminate. When we say that 
God is immanent in humanity, we do not mean that 
the Divine Substance is included in man. The 
Christian conception of God, as we apprehend it, is, 
that from the Divine Substance and personality are 
the forthgoing energies that fill the circuit of his 
universe, so that all things in their inmost nature are 
receptive of them and exist by them. This influx 
from the Divine Personality is not to be confounded 
with that personality itself. If God were present per- 
sonally in nature and not by influx, then nature itself 
were one great Fetish, and the idolaters were right 
who worshipped the sun and the stars. If God were 
in man personally or by his own essence, man him- 
self would be God, and not his dependent creature, 
receptive of Divine inspirations. In man and in na- 
ture alike, in the child at play and in the flower 
which he plucks from its stem, there is the unceas- 
ing influx of the Divine, and out of this they draw 
their breath, and suck the life that warms and feeds 
them. But nature is not conscious of this Divine life 
out of which it grows and blossoms ; man, when his 
higher consciousness is opened, has convictions, de- 
sires, and aspirations, which he knows must come 
from Divine imbreathings and urgencies ; and so he 
bows and worships and returns to God the love 
which he receives. This distinction between influx 
and personality, between the Divine immanence and 



THE IMMANENCE OF GOD, 35 

the Divine essence, though sometimes lost sight of, 
we think is plain and obvious. It should be kept 
steadily in view, as we shall see by and by, if we 
do not see already in the naked statement itself 
that the distinction saves us from fetishism when we 
make God immanent in nature, and from pantheism 
when we make Him immanent in both nature and 
man. 

It hence becomes very plain, too, what we mean 
when we speak of intuitions of God, or inward be- 
holdings of the Deity. Construed literally it has no 
meaning whatever, except to the pantheist himself. 
Intuition is simply the survey which one takes of the 
contents of his own consciousness. It is to the in- 
ternal phenomena of mind, what perception is to the 
external phenoriiena of nature. Perception, if it be 
clear and accurate, gives you what lies without you 
in sharp outline and just perspective ; intuition, if it 
be clear and accurate, catalogues aright the facts of 
consciousness in your experience, intellectual and 
spiritual, and gives the soul's perspectives to itself. 
Of course there can be no intuition of God, since He 
is not included in the contents of consciousness, and 
could not be, without the destruction of the human 
identity and personality. Our mental perspectives, 
present or possible, opened already, or which may be 
opened, give us our own, and the limit where they 
fade off and dissolve in darkness, is precisely where 
pur identity and personality terminate. 



36 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

But though God Himself can never be the content 
of the human consciousness, his highest and best 
work can be. My consciousness at one time may 
give me an inward scene of moral ruin and disorder. 
I may see a creation rise out of this chaos more 
goodly and fair than the order of external nature ; 
changes may be going on within, more auspicious 
than all the ongoings without ; experiences more rich 
than the regalements of sense ; a sunshine from the 
divine face more bright than summer glories ; a peace 
more sweet than the tranquillity of the morning ; af- 
fections purged of self and enlarged to universal love ; 
calls to duty more loud and clear than matin bells ; 
strength to suffer and to do' that comes by prayer ; a 
power back of my personal volitions, transfusing my 
whole being and creating it anew ; convictions of 
truth growing bright to the perfect day ; all these may 
come within the range of my intuitions, and beget a 
faith in God which nothing can shake, and a knowl- 
edge of his 'goodness and power worth more than all 
the deductions of the understanding. It comes not 
from inward beholdings of the Deity, but of what He 
does ; beholdings of such work of grace and power 
as I can ascribe to neither man nor angel, and which 
bring repose under the shadow of his wings. 



PART L 



THE HISTORICAL ARGUMENT. 



" One do I see and twelve ; but second there 
Methinks I know thee, thou beloved one ; 
Not for thy nobler port, for there are none 
More quiet-featured. Some there are who bear 
Their message on their brows ; while others wear 
A look of large commission, nor will shun 
The fiery trial so their work is done. 
But thou hast parted with thine eyes in prayer, 
Unearthly are they both ; and so thy lips 
Seem like the porches of the Spirit-land; 
For thou hast laid a mighty treasure by 
Unlocked by Him in Nature, and thine eye 
Burns with a vision and apocalypse 
Thy own sweet soul can hardly understand." 



.^ I 



CHAPTER I. 

GNOSTICISM. 

'T^HE problem of evil has always been the most 
-*- stubborn and difficult, whether without Chris- 
tianity, or within it, and under its resolving light. No 
Pelagian theories can relieve the burdened conscious- 
Aess from the fact of inhering corruption. It has 
existed under every form of religion, from that of the 
Hindus down to the last modification of New Eng- 
land Calvinism ; and the wit of man has been taxed 
to the utmost so to dispose of the fact as to clear 
the divine character of all responsibility about it. 

It was this laudable motive which gave rise to the 
most daring system of speculation known in the his- 
tory of opinions. That system began to appear soon 
after the ascension of Christ, and grew into gigantic 
proportions by the middle of the second century. It 
was the most formidable heresy that threatened 
Christianity, and overlaid its first purity ; and though 
finally thrown off, and left behind, it imparted to 
Christianity a direction and coloring which it had for 
centuries, and of which it is not wholly relieved to 
this day. There are unmistakable allusions to it in 
Paul's epistles ; it is a clearly established fact that 



40 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

the Apostle John came in contact with it ; it is openly- 
assailed in the epistle which bears his name ; and 
portions of the fourth Gospel, quite unintelligible 
otherwise, are tolerably well understood when we 
know that they were written with the haunting pres- 
ence of this growing heresy. The argument for the 
genuineness of the fourth Gospel cannot be seen in 
its entire force without some knowledge of the con- 
temporaneous Gnostic opinions. 

Gnosticism was a composite of at least four other 
religions, — Parseeism, once the dominant religion of 
Persia ; Hellenism, as modified by Plato ; Judaism ; 
and Christianity. These four were variously com- 
bined ; and, according to the proportions of the mix- 
ture, the new compound very much resembled Chris- 
tianity, and did not greatly obscure its essential 
truths ; or it so distorted and annulled them that 
their native simplicity, power, and beauty, were en- 
tirely gone. 

Gnosticism was an attempt to combine Dualism 
with Christianity. Dualism asserts the doctrine of 
two original eternal principles of good and evil; 
hence two primal uncreated realms of Light and 
Darkness, of immaculate purity and essential de- 
pravity. One was the realm of pure spirit, at the 
head of which was God Himself; the other was the 
realm of matter, — dark, chaotic, and evil. These 
two eternal,- original principles lie at the foundation 
of the Parsee religion ; and with equal distinctness, 



GNOSTICISM. 41 

though with less active antagonism, they are the 
basis of Plato's philosophy as developed in the Ti- 
maeus. This Dualism invaded Christianity, — from 
Persia through Syria and the Syrian Theosophists ; 
from Plato's philosophy through Alexandria and its 
Platonizing Jews and Christians. They formed a 
composite which we will briefly describe, inasmuch as 
it has an important bearing on the exposition and 
evidence of the fourth Gospel. 

For a long period the boundary line between these 
two kingdoms of Good and Evil had not been passed 
over. Each existed apart in its own isolation, — one 
in its transcendent excellence and glory ; the other 
as the outlying chaos, conceived sometimes as inert 
and dead, sometimes as seething with corruption, 
always as disorderly and wild. But it was inevitable 
that the kingdom of light should approach nearer and 
ever nearer the kingdom of darkness. For God — 
the . primal infinite good — was ever sending out 
emanations from Himself These at length hypos- 
tasized in the angelic powers that circled Him about 
and stood nearest to his throne. But out of these 
highest and nearest of the heavenly powers came 
forth emanations in turn, and these hypostasized far- 
ther out and lower down. From these latter came 
forth other emanations ; and, with every remove from 
the infinite original source, the eternal perfections 
were reflected more dimly. Of course these waves of 
emanation can be extended indefinitely ; and you can 



42 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

cogitate any number of heavens to suit your fancy, — 
from the inner circle, most resplendent about the 
throne, to the outermost limit, the Chinese wall of 
the upper celestials that bounds them from chaotic 
darkness and death. These powers thus created suc- 
cessively were called ^Eons, and the whole realm, 
from the centre to the circumference, was the Divine 
Pleromay because within these limits God reigned in 
the fullness and completeness of his perfections. 

Thus far there was no mixture of the two realms. 
But at length the emanations streamed over the Chi- 
nese wall into the realm of dark, dead, chaotic mat- 
ter. The angel on the outermost limit rayed into it, 
and fructified it. Hence a new world arose, — this 
world we live in of mingled good and evil. It was 
not created by God, the supremely good, who never 
appears directly and openly in it ; it was formed by 
the angel who was lowest down and next to it ; whose 
emanations streamed into it, and took on a covering 
of matter. Hence this angel was called the World- 
former. Or, again, he was called the Logos, or Word, 
because a ray from his reason pierced the realm of 
matter, and took its clothing thence. Hence the 
complex nature of man. His most external nature is 
material. It is the hylic coat which he wears, always 
corrupt and poisonous, the seat of all his temptations 
and woes. Within this is his soul, which is an ema- 
nation from the angel World-former, and therefore his 
psychical or soul-nature is a ground of communion, 



GNOSTICISM, 43 

not with the Supreme Good, but only with the World- 
former who made him and ranks just above him. 

There is in man, however, as in the ^ons or angels 
above him, an inmost principle of the supremely good 
and perfect. Because every tier of being which cre- 
ates a next lower one is a medium, though uncon- 
sciously, of the infinite and primal life, and that life 
therefore is immanent in all created things. But, 
before it has reached man, it becomes imbedded un- 
der so many strata that it comes not generally into 
the consciousness. Hence the Logos, or World- 
former, who made us and all terrestrial things, and 
who is the immediate ruler of this lower sphere, while 
he thinks he made it and rules it from himself, is 
really and unconsciously the organ and instrumen- 
tality of the Supreme Divinity. Hence man has a 
threefold nature, — the hylic or fleshly one, which is 
outermost ; the soul-nature, which is next inward, 
and which is an emanation of the World-former ; and 
the deepest and inmost of all, buried far beneath the 
consciousness of common men, the spiritual or pneu- 
matic nature, which is the pure emanation of God 
himself. 

The sum is, this is too bad a world to be regarded 
as the handiwork of a perfect Being. The essential 
evil of matter, and hence the utter depravity of the 
fleshly nature, lie at the foundation of all the Gnostic 
systems. 

It will be seen at once how Christianity, on the 



44 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

side of Judaism, holds out an irresistible lure to the 
first theosophist who might choose to dovetail Gnos- 
ticism into it. The wonder is that they did not in- 
terpenetrate so tenaciously as to defy the wit of the 
Church fathers to break them off from each other 
and keep them asunder. The problem of evil, if not 
solved, was at least artfully dodged, at a time when it 
was the hardest and the sorest ; when the whole cre- 
ation was groaning and travailing in pain. The Di- 
vine character stands clear of all responsibility touch- 
ing its origin. Not only so, but the Old Testament 
history, and the whole dispensation of Judaism, the 
stumbling-block of the Christian believer, can now be 
fitted in with Christianity with marvelous symmetry. 
Nothing is easier. The God of the Old Testament, 
sternly just, sometimes with changeful passion and 
consuming anger, was not the God of Christianity, 
but the World-former himself, ruling his own king- 
dom and trying to hold it in its wild disorder. Con- 
fessedly, the Being who fashioned this world, and 
governs it, is the Jehovah-angel of the Old Testa- 
ment. See thus how the threefold nature of man is 
marvelously displayed ! The heathen — lost in thick 
darkness, and worshipping devils — are those on 
whom the hylic coat of sense and matter hangs thick 
and heavy ; and the soul-nature, even, is lost under 
it, and comes not into consciousness. Only a few 
chosen people have had this consciousness awakened 
and so brought into acknowledged relations with, the 



GNOSTICISM, 45 

World-former who governs them. These are the 
Jews, — not the chosen people of the Supreme God 
but of the World-former, who has parted them off, 
and, with constant watching and sore trials of his 
patience, keeps them in external order by rigor- 
ous commandments and temporal judgments. The 
World-former, with his Jews, expected a Messiah ; 
but it was only a temporal one, who was to extend, 
not his own reign, but that of the World-former him- 
self. The Messiah was to be his subject and con- 
quering vicegerent. A few, however, there were 
whose pneumatic or deepest natures had been touched 
and vitalized. Beneath the covering of flesh and 
sense, beneath even the soul-nature itself, a chord 
was touched in their profounder contemplations 
whose vibrations thrilled beyond the World-former, 
even up to the First Good, First Perfect, and First 
Fair, and gave them communings with the Highest. 
Such minds were choice and few ; but they waited 
and watched for the true Christ, and they indicated 
his possible achievement in human nature. By this 
clever dovetailing, Christianity is relieved of all diffi- 
culty arising from its connection with Judaism, and 
Judaism adjusts itself easily in a grand system of the 
Universe. 

The World-former does not know that there is a 
sovereign hand that uses him and turns him whither 
it will. He thinks he is acting only from himself and 
for himself, and never dreams that he is preparing 



4^ THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

the way for a higher ^Eon to come and supersede 
him. But such is the fact, and in the fullness of time 
the pneumatic Christ appears. But He must not take 
upon him our flesh and blood. Nothing could be 
more abhorrent to Gnosticism than to bring the 
Highest in contact with corrupt and poisonous mat- 
ter. His immaculate purity must be kept clear of its 
stains. How, then, can the Christ, either as the 
Highest himself, or as his first -^on, get introduced 
into this bad world to save it 1 In either of two 
ways. 

Jesus Christ was, in fact, two persons in one. 
Jesus was a mere man of Jewish descent, born like 
any other man. But he was of pious disposition, 
and went to the Jordan to be baptized. Then the 
-^on Christ descended, and entered him, and acted 
and spake through him ; and so from that period his 
marvelous history unfolds, and the wisdom of God 
drops from his lips. The Jews arraigned and cruci- 
fied the man Jesus. They thought to have killed the 
Christ, but him they could not touch. Before the 
crucifixion the ^on Christ re-ascended to his skies, 
and only a man like us died upon the cross. Hence 
his exclamation in that awful hour after the God had 
gone up and left him, "Why hast thou forsaken 
me .? " 

Or there is another way by which Gnosticism, 
always abhorring the touch of matter, eludes the 
difficulty. Some Gnostics held that Jesus Christ was 



GNOSTICISM. 47 

one person, but that there was no incarnation at all ; 
that He did not come in the flesh, but only in divine 
shapes that took its image and likeness. The angel- 
ophanies of the Old Testament, they said, were not 
material forms, but celestial substances taking on 
the appearances of the human figure. Even so the 
Christ that appeared in Palestine was not clothed in 
veritable flesh and blood, but only in its semblance 
and effigy ; for it is in the power of God at any- 
time to evolve this appearance out of Himself, and 
project it into this lower world. The Jews thought 
they crucified a man : but therein were they de- 
ceived, and their impotent rage defeated ; for the 
agony and the death were only phantasmic, while the 
real Christ within the outward semblance was un- 
touched by the spear and the nails. 

Not all men can rise out of hylic darkness, or out of 
the hard service of the World-former, to the knowl- 
edge of the pneumatic Christ and communion with 
the Highest. It is only those whose inmost natures 
have been quickened and unfolded. These can ap- 
peal to their highest consciousness. They have 
done with the poor outward letter of the Jewish 
World-former, and have intuitions of the supreme 
Deity. They look down with pity upon those still 
held in bondage, whether to the Jewish letter or to 
the poisonous coverings of flesh and sense. 

Gnosticism prevailed extensively during the second 
century, and did not become extinct before the mid- 



48 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

die of the fourth. Men of wealth, nobility, and in- 
telligence, embraced Christianity under some Gnos- 
tic form ; for it fostered mightily that serene self- 
complacency which makes men well-pleasing to them- 
selves, and lifts them above their fellows. It exerted, 
however, other and more lasting influences. Its 
prime article, the essential evil of matter as the dead- 
liest foe of the internal man, led on to asceticism and 
the maceration of the flesh. It made marriage odious, 
and all sensual pleasure corrupting and vile ; it made 
all nature but a blight, an incumbent curse upon the 
spirit ; and either its direct influence, or the ground 
principle out of which it grew and flourished, sent the 
monks into the monasteries or the deserts, doomed 
the priests to celibacy, and wrenched human nature 
itself into frightful distortions. The Church excluded 
Gnosticism, but not till its virus had entered her 
veins and exerted a potent influence in shaping both 
her theology and institutions. Augustine, her great- 
est theologian, came* into the Church out of one of 
the forms of Gnosticism, and through him it flings 
its long shadow down the centuries, even over the 
theology of the modern age. 

Not only the orthodox, but the heretic theologies 
were sometimes determined either directly by Gnos- 
tic influence or by the fundamental principle from 
which it comes. Arianism is not a system of dual- 
ism : it does not assert an eternal primitive matter ; 
but it abhors to bring God in contact with matter, 



GNOSTICISM. 49 

and so makes Christ a sub-deity or -^on under him, 
created out of nothing, that he in turn might create 
the world and become incarnate in time. Therefore 
nature would not^ead us directly up to the supreme 
God, but to the sub-deity who created nature, who 
became incarnate within it, who intercedes for us, 
while the Supreme himself dwells apart, never pass- 
ing over into the finite except through the mediating 
Christ and his angels. 

The Gnostics began to appear soon after the ascen- 
sion of Christ, and during the second century their 
spread was rapid and wide. Gibbon says they " cov- 
ered both Egypt and Asia." They were polite, learned, 
and wealthy, and highly self-exalted. They had their 
congregations, their bishops and doctors, and some- 
times mingled imperceptibly and extensively among 
the congregations of the faithful. They condescend- 
ingly accepted Christianity in full ; but, as they drew 
it up and absorbed it in their own pneumatic con- 
sciousness, they held it sublimed in a higher Gnosis, 
— a very different religion from that of the vulgar 
Christian multitude around them. They were shy of 
martyrdom, and could evade the authorities. They 
could not always be distinguished from the Catholic 
Christians, with whom they had no hesitation to com- 
mune and worship ; but there was one subject by 
which they could generally be discovered and sifted 
out. If questioned touching the resurrection of the 
dead, they would " look foohsh," says TertuUian, and 
4 



50 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

finally disclose themselves. The resurrection of the 
material body was abhorrent to their whole system 
of faith. 

Of course such a system, ramifjfing into the most 
vital part of Christianity, adhering as a parasite, 
and threatening to suck its life-blood, was not ex- 
truded and left behind without sharp and persistent 
controversy. The controversy begins with Paul, who 
gives a side-blow here and there at the incipient 
heresy ; John stops in his exhortations of brotherly 
love to launch his anathemas against it ; Polycarp, 
the disciple of John, and the saintly martyr, ascribes 
it to Satan ; Irenaeus, the disciple of Polycarp, wrote 
to refute it ; and Tertullian, at the close of the sec- 
ond century, employed his rough and fiery eloquence 
to denounce it. 



CHAPTER II. 

SAINT JOHN AT EPHESUS. 

T3ERHAPS no country on the face of the earth 
has been the centre of influences more subtile 
and pervading than Ionia, so far as those influences 
have been extended by means of literature. It shaped 
the intellect of the world in its finest moulds, for it 
was plastic over the mind of Greece ; it has deter- 
mined most profoundly its religious culture, for those 
writings of the Christian canon which appealed to the 
deeper consciousness were produced within its trans- 
parent and inspiring ethers. In our gross and sleepy 
occidentalism we constantly lose sight of the educa- 
tive power of nature under conditions such as we 
have never experienced and hardly imagined, over 
those minds which have produced the master-pieces 
in art, in literature, and in religion. This little Greek 
province of Ionia has given us Homer and the Iliad, 
and made all other poetry but a broken strain ; it 
has given us the fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse, 
which find us at the close of eighteen centuries 
veiling our sight before the too burning disclosures 
of the Godhead. It has given us a language whose 
sound is music and whose touch can bring the 



52 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

subtlest thought within its soft and delicate shadings. 
If it is bad philosophy to say with Mr. Buckle that 
man with his culture and his religions is the mere 
product of his environments, so it is equally bad 
to say that God is only a great Magician, who works 
without means and without law, and not the Infinite 
Providence who works both within man and around 
him by his immanence in both nature and humanity. 
Ionia lay upon the western coast of Asia Minor, 
mainly between two rivers, though extending a little 
beyond them ; the Hermus on the north and the 
Meander on the south. It was about one hundred 
miles in length, and less than half that average dis- 
tance in breadth, therefore comprising less territory 
than the little State of Massachusetts. Two beauti- 
ful islands belonged to it, separated from it by narrow 
straits ; Chios towards the north, and Samos towards 
the south. Besides the two rivers already named, 
there is a third, the Cayster, which flows between 
them, at whose mouth stood the city of Ephesus. 
These three rivers find their way to the sea through 
valleys of surpassing fertility, and the coast from 
river to river is skirted by a belt of land, winding 
with the winding coast, fronting the islands which 
lie off as gems upon the sea, teeming with luxuriance 
and gleaming in the gorgeous beauty of an oriental 
clime. Its climate, though the most charming in the 
world, is not one which melts and debilitates. Its 
brilliant atmosphere taken into human lungs, is a 



ST. JOHN AT EPHESUS. S3 

perpetual stimulus, sparkling through the blood and 
through the brain, and thence through the soul itself, 
to sharpen its faculties and inspire its imaginative 
powers. 

This was Ionia ; colonized from the selectest por- 
tion of the Greek race, a thousand years before 
Christ. Twelve Greek cities rose along the coast, 
and upon the two islands, confederate for the pur- 
poses of government and religion, and the common 
life and culture which give birth to art and literature. 
Architecture attained here its finishing grace in the 
Ionic column. Genius not only sung its sublimest 
epic in the Iliad, but language itself, newly modu- 
lated, had a breezy lightness and softness in the 
Ionian lyrics which became the models of Greece. 

Mark the indentation of the coast and the islands 
by which Ionia opens towards the ^gean, and in- 
vites the commerce of the world ! Mark the three 
rivers winding through fertile meadows by which it 
opens into the interior of Asia. By a magnificent 
Roman road which crossed the table-lands of Phrygia, 
and passed over the ridge of Taurus even to the river 
Euphrates, the cities of Ionia became the marts of 
an immense trade which set from the interior to- 
wards the Mediterranean sea. Consequently this 
little Greek confederacy, though small in territory, 
became the centre of a widely-extended influence 
upon oriental life, religion, and manners. 

Ephesus was the metropolis of Ionia, and under 



54 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

the Empire was the chief city of proconsular Asia. 
It stood at the mouth of the Cayster, on the southern 
bank of the river, extending over a wide plain and up 
the slopes of a mountain ridge called Coressus, 
which shut it in from the south, and up the slopes of 
another ridge on the right, called Mount Prion, 
which shut it in from the east. Within this brief 
space the oriental Greek wantoned and reveled, as 
if life were given for a perpetual holiday, and its main 
business were to enjoy the charms of earth and sky, 
and breathe the exhilarating airs. Near the banks 
of the river northeast of the city, rose the temple of 
Diana, one of the seven wonders of the world, with 
its one hundred and twenty-seven columns sixty feet 
high, each the gift of a king, and in which the Ionic 
style of architecture culminated in its highest perfec- 
tion. On the side of Mount Prion was the theatre, 
with its immense circular rows of seats rising one 
above another, open to the brilliant sky, crowded 
often with the vast multitudes, not always like the 
mob who shouted " Great is Diana of the Ephesians," 
but answering with acclamations to music and song, 
sometimes perhaps to works of genius in a language 
whose vowel sounds made it the softest and sweetest 
that ever fell upon human ears. Southeast of the 
city and between Coressus and Prion was the gymna- 
sium, where the exuberant life overflowed in athletic 
games. The annual festival held in honor of Diana, 
exhibited the rites of the Greek oriental religion. 



SAINT JOHN AT EPHESUS. 55 

What a contrast to our Puritan solemnity and sobri- 
ety ! It was called " the common meeting of Asia." 
It was held through the month of May, and it drew 
throngs of devotees with their wives and children, 
not only from along the coast but from far away in 
the interior, who came for dance and song, for the 
amusements of the theatre and the gymnasium, for 
the rites of Diana, whose image was enshrined within 
the long, brilliant rows of colonnades, where came the 
vast and winding processions of joyous worshippers. 
The Asian Diana personified the all-fructifying and 
nourishing powers of nature, and hence her festival 
was held in the vernal season, when all nature was 
storming into life, and it made the days and nights 
of the month of May " one long scene of revelry." ^ 

Partly within the limits of Ionia, partly just be- 
yond in the neighboring provinces, were the cities 
which were to contain the seven churches, holding 
" the seven golden candlesticks," to bear aloft the 
Hght of Christianity to this portion of the eastern 
world. Not very far off is the little island of Pat- 
mos, unlike the others which gem the waters with 
green, but rising as a bald and barren rock out of 
the ^gean sea. 

We have said enough fully to possess our readers 
with the idea of the vast importance of Ephesus as 
one of the strongholds of the pagan religion, one of 
the keys of its position which Christianity would be 

1 Conybcare and Howson's Lifo of St Paul, vol ii. p. 79- 



56 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

likely to take and hold. Notwithstanding the stim- 
ulating powers of nature amid which they lived, and 
the glorious traditions that urged them from behind, 
and the models of intellectual beauty which charmed 
their imaginations, the Asiatic Greeks sank into de- 
generacy and decay. An effeminate and voluptuous 
race read of the heroes that thundered through the 
Iliad without a spark of heroism in themselves. Re- 
ligion itself became to them, not a light which leads 
upward into life, but which lured them downward into 
death. It was made to throw its consecrating veil 
over the most brutalizing sensuality, and the sacred 
groves concealed abominations which would bring a 
blush upon the face of the open day. We do not 
know that the groves of Mount Prion, like the groves 
of Daphne near Antioch, were consecrated to lust, 
but it is very certain that manhood and womanhood 
in the oriental Greek cities were infected with the 
common leprosy and sank down in Asiatic effem- 
inacy and corruption. The cities of Ionia were not 
an exception. Their history illustrates the great 
truth that without a religion which brings life and 
health to the soul, the most illumined page of nature 
will grow dark to it and the most brilliant atmos- 
phere, though drank as a constant elixir out of 
heaven, will not save it from consumption and death. 
It is certain that the Gospel was preached at Eph- 
esus by Paul soon after the middle of the first cen- 
tury, and that a church was gathered there whose 



SAINT JOHN AT EFHESUS, 57 

^influence extended rapidly through the neighboring 
country. Its converts were drawn first firom the 
Jewish synagogue, but afterwards and mainly from 
the Greeks and orientals, more curious to know and 
more quick to receive and understand the truths of 
the new religion, and doubtless yearning towards the 
light out of the depths of their own degrading su- 
perstition. At the end of three years even the mag- 
nificent temple of Diana began to be deserted of its 
worshippers, its long processions to be thinned out, 
which shows how deep was the hunger of the multi- 
tudes and how directly Christianity went to their 
sorest needs. 

We find the Apostle John, as early as a. d. 60, 
according to the New Testament narratives and 
epistles, a colaborer with the Apostles in or near 
Jerusalem. He then vanishes from history ; but he 
reappears at Ephesus towards the close of the cen- 
tury, where memorials of unquestionable authenticity 
fix the last scenes of his life. We cannot mistake 
the exigency which brought him hither. Christian- 
ity had broken away from the synagogue, had shiv- 
ered in pieces the Jewish shell which sought at first 
to confine it, and thrown itself on the vast floating 
waves of gentile peoples as a religion for humanity 
itself, which it was to renovate and redeem. It had 
already penetrated far beyond the limits of Ionia, and 
its leaven was fermenting and heaving the masses 
with life. "The seven churches that are in Asia" 



58 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

had arisen and were flinging their constellated light 
through the darkness. We knew from the letter of 
Pliny to Trajan, written soon after the close of the 
century, how wide and deep throughout this region 
the influence of Christianity had become. *'The 
contagion of this superstition," says he, "has not 
only seized the cities but the villages and open coun- 
try. The temples are well nigh deserted, the sacred 
rites for a long time have been intermitted, and vic- 
tims for sacrifice are rarely purchased." But just in 
the degree that Christianity extended its influence 
would its native purity be liable to be over-clouded 
and its sharply cut lines of demarcation to become 
wavy and dim. This was the case among the Asiatic 
Greeks, and especially at Ephesus, the heart of the 
country whence the tides of life were constantly 
flowing, and into which they constantly returned. 
Metaphysical, subtle, curious, both analytical and 
constructive, and imaginative in the highest degree, 
with a language flexible to all the ranges and reaches 
of thought, the Greek mind was now to receive and 
act upon Christianity, and give it all its possible 
changes and combinations. Gnosticism was already 
at Ephesus. Cerinthus, a Hellenistic Jew, had come 
from Alexandria and adopted Christianity into his 
all-absorbing system of belief Judaism had before 
been received into it. He made Jesus and Christ 
two persons. Jesus was a man like other men, with 
a human father and mother, but at his baptism the 



SAINT JOHN AT EPHESUS. 59 

higher ^on, Christ, descended and entered him as 
the Holy Spirit, but ascended again and left him 
before his crucifixion. Cerinthus would hear and 
know nothing of a suffering and dying Messiah, but 
only of a heavenly one whose splendor was un- 
dimmed and untarnished by flesh and sense, and 
of whom the man Jesus was not an incarnation but 
only the passive organ and vehicle. This man was 
at Ephesus in the last decade of the first century. 

Almost everything else was there at this conflux 
of the Eastern religions and superstitions. The arts 
of magic which are always in vogue where there is 
no enlightened faith in the supernatural, were prac 
ticed by strolling astrologers who infested every prin- 
cipal city from the Euphrates to the Tiber. They, 
too, were at Ephesus, exorcising demons by charms 
and incantations. The worship of Diana of the 
Ephesians had become a species of sorcery. The 
silver shrines bearing the image of the goddess with 
magical letters — the famous " Ephesia granimata " 
— were worn as charms and amulets by votaries 
from all the provinces of lesser Asia. Moreover, a 
more fantastic Gnosticism than that even of Cerin- 
thus had been imported and diffused from Syria. 
Abhorring the idea that God could appear in this 
bad world directly and thus stain with matter his 
immaculate purity, it made God himself a great ma- 
gician who could bejuggle the senses of men by pro- 
jecting appearances upon them, which appearances. 



6o THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

though not matter, were the semblance of it without 
its substance. 

It is certain that John was in Ephesus in the last 
decade of the century presiding over the constellated 
churches of that region, purging them from corrup- 
tion and guarding their purity. It is certain that he 
here met Cerinthus and opposed him. The imme- 
diate disciples of John so reported, and there is not 
the least reason to question their truth. Many anec- 
dotes are told of him ; of his meeting Cerinthus at a 
' bath and fleeing instantly away from it ; of his apos- 
tolic watch and tender care over the churches of Asia ; 
of his going into the fastnesses of the mountains to 
reclaim a young m^an who had apostatized and joined 
a gang of robbers — such as is well-known infested 
the provinces when fleeced by the Roman proconsuls ; 
of his serene and beautiful old age, when too weak to 
walk alone he was borne into the assembly and out 
of it with exhortations to brotherly love ever upon 
his lips till the monotony tired them ; of his banish- 
ment to the island of Patmos in the persecution 
under Domitian, and his return thence in a. d. 97 ; 
of his death about the close of the century when 
past the age of ninety ; of his burial-place which 
Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, towards the close of 
the second century, speaks of as a sacred spot well 
known in his day to the Christians of that region 
who cherished tenderly the local traditions of the be- 
loved disciple. The anecdotes are strikingly characr 



SAINT JOHN AT EPHESUS. 6 1 

teristic, allowing in the details for some additions 
and colorings, just such as a fond and gossipy tradi- 
tion would be likely to give.^ 

That the Apostle was called to a post where Chris- 
tianity was centralizing its forces at the most fearful 
crisis of its history, — a post which needed the per- 
sonal presence and commanding authority of one 
who had not only seen and heard the Lord Jesus in 
the days of his earthly life but who held open con- 
verse with Him still ; that not only the exigencies of 
the times called him there, but the Divine Provi- 
dence openly manifested to protect the nascent 
church and the rising faith, — is perfectly plain, we 
think, from all the memorials of this period both sa- 
cred and profane. It is convincingly evident when 
you study the Johannean writings and character and 
regard them as a collective force, thrown in at one of 
the most perilous conjunctures in human develop- 
ment to control it and guide it and hold it under be- 
nign spiritual laws. Christianity had escaped one 
danger and had fallen upon another vastly more 
threatening, and was in the breakers already. It 
had broken the bondage of Judaism, thanks to the 
intrepid power and inspired logic of Paul ; and the 
poor and vanishing sect of the Ebionites which the 
Church had fairly thrown off was the last fragment 
of the broken chain. It had cleared the synagogue 
completely, and on the side of the Jew the peril was 

1 Eusebius H. E. iii. 23, 31 ; iv. 14. 



62 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

past. Not SO on the part of the Greek whose nimble 
intellect and soaring imagination could put all the 
philosophies and religions of the world together and 
fuse them through every changeable and gorgeous 
shape which could captivate the fancy of man, inflame 
his passions, or flatter his pride. Christianity, left to 
its natural course as a mere human system evolved 
out of the common and seething mass of opinions, 
would not have brought down the proud imaginations 
and humbled the philosophies of this world at its 
feet. It was in imminent danger now of being drawn 
up and absorbed by them ; of serving as the fringe of 
a new Pantheism, or having a place in a heathen Pan- 
theon enlarged and decorated for its reception. Such 
plainly was the crisis when John went to Ephesus. 

John lived '^to the times of Trajan," says Euse- 
bius ; and others say more definitely that he died in 
the third year of that emperor's reign, that is, in the 
year loo, at or near to its close. His death at least 
could not have been earlier. This does not rest on 
any uncertain tradition. We know it from other data. 
Polycarp, a disciple of John, who had drank deeply 
of the same spirit, was placed by him over the neigh- 
boring church at Smyrna, one of " the seven churches 
in Asia," the light of whose golden candlesticks the 
Apostle watched from Ephesus and labored to keep 
undimmed. There Polycarp lived and preached ever 
after, and there he suffered martyrdom in the year 
167. He was then eighty-six years old, as he says 



SAINT JOHN A T EPHESUS, 63 

to his persecutors when they urged him to abjure his 
Saviour : " Eighty-six years have 'I served Him." 
This is contained in the letter of the church at 
Smyrna, written by eye-witnesses describing the 
beautiful and triumphant death of that aged bishop 
and reporting his words.^ This would give barely 
twenty years of his life as falling within the first cen- 
tury. He could hardly have been younger than that 
when John placed him over the church at Smyrna, 
and it becomes more probable that the Apostle lived 
past the century than that he died before its close. 
We know from Pliny's letter to Trajan already re- 
ferred to, written close upon this time, that Chris- 
tianity had then become widely diffused in Asia 
Minor, and that the heathen temples were becoming 
deserted of their worshippers. « 

1 This letter has some marks of embellishment from % later hand, 
but we regard its facts and dates as authentic. It is given by Eusebius. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE JOHANNEAN WRITINGS : THEIR CONGRUITY, INTE- 
RIOR RELATIONS AND IDENTITY OF AUTHORSHIP. 

TAKING for our present purpose the fourth 
Gospel, the CathoUc Epistle, and the Apoca- 
lypse, and the memorials of John found in the sy- 
noptics, a character rises before us sketched and 
shaded with marvelous symmetry, consistency, and 
grace, and a class of writings present themselves, 
whose interior relations are of a most extraordinary 
kind. The character is such that no writer of that 
age would have created it as fiction, and the relations 
of these writings are not only impossible, but unim- 
aginable on any theory which does not make them 
the production of one mind and genius. 

To suppose a set of myth-makers of opposite opin- 
ions and tendencies, scattered through half a century 
and half of the then civilized world, to have left a 
mass of documents, partly forged, partly compiled from 
uncertain tradition, partly made up of imaginations 
taken unconsciously for facts ; that these were thrown 
hap-hazard together, and that out of them emerges a 
character of such freshness and originality as that of 
John, of tints so rich, and varied, and delicate, and 



THE yOHANNEAN WRITINGS, 65 

yet SO harmoniously blended, — to suppose this would 
be supposing no less than a moral miracle. We are 
not saying that this character is unimaginable or 
beyond the reach of creative art under a single and 
very skillful hand ; we are saying that such compilers 
could no more have produced it, and that by acci- 
dent, than a hundred Greek slaves could build the 
temple of Diana by throwing down at random their 
cart-loads of stone and mortar. 

The character of John is composed of two vastly 
differing elements, rarely found in such combination 
except under the transfusing power of the Christian 
spirit, but found there in its perfection and consum- 
mation. These two elements are very great mascu- 
line strength, joined with affections so overflowing 
^ and tender, that the strength is concealed under their 
profusion, except when occasions and emergencies 
bring it to the test. The granite is hidden under the 
tendrils that overhang it with flowers. It is only by 
assuming that these two elements are inconsistent 
with each other that the critics have raised their ob- 
jections against the congruity of the canonical Jo- 
hannean writings, whereas to blend them together is 
the great achievement of Christianity in human na- 
ture, and the blending is most perfect when the dis- 
ciple leans most intimately on the bosom of his Lord. 
The combination does not impair the masculine in- 
trepidity, but preserves it and tones it, though con- 
cealing it sometimes under the mildest of womanly 
5 



66 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

gentleness. That there was this native hardihood in 
the favorite disciple, intensified even to savageness, 
there are indications which cannot be mistaken. The 
two sons of Zebedee were called ** thunderers," and 
that the surname was descriptive of natural traits, is 
shown by the fiery zeal which prompted them to in- 
voke the lightnings to blast the Samaritan city which 
refused them hospitality. This, it must be remem- 
bered, was in the first stages of discipleship, while as 
yet they understood the Messiah's kingdom to be one 
of temporal power and magnificence, and aspired to 
its chief honors and rewards. Not yet had the deep 
and abundant fountains of love been called forth to 
their overflowing. But even when this is the case, 
and when they trickle forth in all their tenderness, 
spreading everywhere the most delicate verdure and 
bloom, we are never allowed to forget the rock-ribbed 
back-ground which supports the whole. Something 
reminds us even in the softest refinement and spirit- 
uality of the favorite disciple that these come not out 
of weakness and shallowness. When Jesus was ar- 
rested in Gethsemane, the disciples dispersed and 
fled for their lives. But there was one exception. 
We follow on, and in the open court of the High 
Priest's palace where Jesus is brought for insult and 
mockery, appears the youthful John who had kept 
close to his Master. Peter follows cautiously at a 
distance, and is let in through John's intercession ; 
but Peter's courage soon gives way amid the appal- 



THE JOHANNEAN WRITINGS. 6/ 

ling scene. At the cross again, under the storm of 
rage, and amid the scofifs and wagging of heads, Jesus 
looks down and sees a single disciple standing close 
by. It is John again, — the same who drank in the 
divine love on his breast with a tenderness which 
was more than woman's, and who when the storm 
came which sifted his followers like wheat, evinced a 
greatness and strength of character beyond that of 
common men. It shows us, what history and ex- 
perience teach alike, that in the most trying emer- 
gencies, the gentlest natures are the strongest, pro- 
vided the divine gentleness has made them great. 

There are three principal documents extant which 
the churches ascribe to the beloved disciple, — the 
fourth Gospel, the Catholic Epistle, and the Apoca- 
lypse. That the first two were written by the same 
hand, is shawn from internal evidence which cannot 
be resisted. An imitator or forger might have strung 
together phrases culled out of the fourth Gospel such 
as occur in the Epistle, but he never could have so 
made it live as to preserve the spirit that breathes 
through it spontaneously and gives fragrancy to the 
whole. The theology of the fourth Gospel, the doc- 
trine of the Logos, is here set forth, not only in the 
terms but with the unction known only to the be- 
loved disciple. But this is not all. The very atmos- 
phere of Ephesus is felt in every chapter of the Cath- 
olic Epistle. Through every one there is an outlook 
upon the Gnostic heresy confronting us in some 



68 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

shape. In the opening passage we have it full- in the 
eye, as if in the first stroke of his pen the writer was 
refuting the false teacher who turned the Christ into 
some intangible unreality or phantasm, " that which 
we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, 
which we have looked upon, and our hands have 
HANDLED of the Word of Life." Every sense that 
can testify is appealed to. Not only so. We have it 
asserted and reiterated that " Jesus is the Christ," and 
he who denies this is a " liar." This finds its point 
and burden of meaning when we have Cerinthus 
in full view, asserting that Jesus was not the Christ, 
but that He was one person, and Christ who never 
came in the flesh was quite another person. By this, 
says the writer of the Catholic Epistle, ye shall try 
the spirits and distinguish them. " Every spirit that 
confesseth that J^esus Christ is come i7t the flesh is of 
God, and every spirit that says Jesus Christ is not 
come in the flesh is not of God, and this is that 
spirit of anti-Christ whereof ye have heard it should 
come, and even now already is in the world." 

That " sin is a transgression of the law," and that 
" he that doeth righteousness is righteous," sound 
very much in our modern ears, like saying sin is sin, 
and virtue is virtue. Not so in presence of a heresy 
whicH allowed men to grovel in the stye of sensuality, 
and yet promised to keep their inmost souls separate 
and immaculate before the Highest. In the whole 
cast and style of this Epistle we not only know that 



THE yOHANNEAN WRITINGS. 69 

the spirit that gave form and coloring to the fourth 
Gospel is with us, but that the very same moral at- 
mosphere which lay upon lesser Asia at the close of 
the first century, is all around us. 

But the commingling of the two elements in the 
Catholic Epistle is such as nature and not art must 
have given them. Through the abounding tender- 
ness, whose language is ever reiterated, breaks the 
most severe and wrathful denunciation. Almost in 
the same sentence come the blessings and the curses. 
The words " little children," which should rather be 
rendered " my dear children," with fond allusions to 
the divine love and fatherhood, alternate with " mur- 
derer," " liar," and " anti-christ," and " children of 
the devil," applied to the heretics of his day. In the 
disciple leaning on the divine breast and drinking its 
love, we never quite lose sight of the darker back- 
ground of character in the man who invoked light- 
nings on the Samaritans. 

But more remarkably and unmistakably do we find 
all this in the Apocalypse brought out in such wise 
as no human imagination could have invented. It is 
no part of our work to expound the Apocalypse, but 
we affirm that its congruity with the other Johannean 
writings is most remarkable, and they run into each 
other by relations exceedingly subtile and pervasive. 
This fact we know is not generally acknowledged, 
but it will be obvious to the reader the longer he 
studies the contents and interior relationships of 
these writings. 



70 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

The Apocalypse as is now generally conceded is 
the writing of John the Evangelist. Doubts, it is 
true, were entertained on this point in the third 
century, and there were some Greek churches which 
did not receive it. But there were obvious reasons. 
From the nature of its contents it was not read in 
the churches, and therefore was not so publicly 
known as the four Gospels. But it was early attested 
and commented upon ; and modern investigation and 
criticism render a verdict in favor of its genuineness 
which is emphatic and substantially unanimous. 
Perhaps, however, the Tiibingen critics would not 
have been quite so swift in claiming the Apocalypse 
as the work of John, had not its contents on super- 
ficial examination indicated a different hand from the 
one which wrote the fourth Gospel, and afforded 
therefore new ground from which to assail the. genu- 
ineness of the latter. Both, so we are told, could not 
be the productions of the same mind, so totally 
diverse are they in matter and style. One has an 
artless or else exceedingly artful simplicity ; the other 
an unwonted gorgeousness and grandeur ; one is in 
comparatively pure Greek ; the other is in bad Greek, 
and constantly violates the structural rules of the 
language. 

A comparison of these two works reveals some of 
the most profound and subtile of psychological phe- 
nomena, and those which are the most infallible of all 
circumstantial evidence. When we open the Apoca- 



THE yOHANNEAN WRITINGS. 7 1 

lypse, we are called upon to recognize at once a new 
mental condition and one professedly abnormal. It 
is the state of seership, out of which some of the old 
prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel for example, and David 
sometimes, prophesied and wrote. It was produced 
from a state described by the author himself as €v ttv^v- 
/xart. No critic who refuses to take this into the ac- 
count can say anything of the Apocalypse, whether 
of its form or essence, which is of the least value 
whatever. No critic, we think, who does take this 
into the account and understand its bearings, will 
rise from his investigation with any doubt that the 
same hand wrote this book that wrote the fourth 
Gospel and Catholic Epistle, and that the same per- 
sonality and lines of character which appear in the 
latter two, are intensified in the former to their sub- 
limest consummation. 

Says Mr. J. J. Tayler in his treatise on the fourth 
Gospel, "No living writer has exhibited a more re- 
markable change 6f style in the course of his literary 
career, than Mr. Carlyle ; yet if we compare his ' Life 
of Schiller * with his ^ French Revolution,' or his 
* History of Frederick the Great,' notwithstanding 
the great disparity of form, every reader of ordinary 
discernment will recognize the same fundamental 
characteristics of his peculiar genius in his earlier 
and his later works." The same, he says, is true of 
Milton. " Apply this standard to the two books now 
under consideration, and the conclusion,'' he says. 



72 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

" will be irresistible, that if the Apostle John be the 
author of the Apocalypse, he cannot have written the 
Gospel ; if he wrote the Gospel, he cannot be the 
author of the Apocalypse."^ He then goes on to 
prove that the Apostle John did write the Apoca- 
lypse, the early testimony being nearly unanimous on 
that point, and therefore he did not write the fourth 
Gospel. Theodore Parker, and more recently. Pro- 
fessor Davidson, come to the same result, and they 
echo the Tubingen critics generally. 

It never seems to enter the conception of any of 
these writers that there is any such condition of the 
human faculties as seership^ or if they do that it is 
anything else than a normal exercise of the imagina- 
tion, as in the case of Milton and Carlyle. The very 
stand-point from which John says he wrote the Apoc- 
alypse, and which determines the very nature and 
style of his production, they ignore altogether, or 
have not the remotest idea of, and so their volumes of 
criticism are not worth the paper tRey have wasted. 

There are three modes and degrees of apprehend- 
ing truth. It may be reasoned and proved argumen- 
tatively by strong intellection like that of Paul; it 
may be perceived intuitively under the inspiration of 
the heart, or it may be visioned objectively by repre- 
sentatives and symbols, when the prophet becomes a 
seer. The deepest and clearest intuition is nearest to 
the state of the highest seership, and if John drank 

1 Pages 13, 14. 



I 



THE yOHANNEAN WRITINGS. 73 

the deepest and clearest draughts of the divine love 
he would be the one of all the twelve on whom the 
Apocalypse would open its magnificent scenery. 

We do not say this, believing that the seership of 
the Apostle was a natural development of his facul- 
ties, but simply supposing that the Divine Provi- 
dence never acts by magic ; that the Spirit does not 
select its instrumentalities arbitrarily, but those best 
prepared naturally and psychologically for its highest 
inspirations and disclosures. The evidence we are 
about to unfold, however, is all the same, whatever 
view we take of the inspiration of these writings. 

When the mind of a speaker or writer passes from 
its normal state to that of seership, two things are to 
be observed. He speaks thereafter not from himself, 
not according to his own tastes and models. His 
will no longer determines either his style or matter, 
but both are determined by the uncontrolled spon- 
taneities within him. Hence the higher prophetic 
style is never that of simple narrative or voluntary 
utterance. 

But neither again is it a style arbitrarily induced 
upon the writer, and altogether foreign to him. Be- 
cause in the seer his subjective state becomes objec- 
tive. The truth that lay in his mind, or was bodied 
in his speech in the form of metaphor, now passes 
out of his mind, and the metaphors become the living 
beings and the moving panorama of an objective 
world. Therefore, while the seer does not speak from 



74 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

his own personality but from a consciousness deeper 
than his natural one, his personality, nevertheless, 
does not disappear. Rather it reappears, though 
changed and sublimed, in a higher order of mental 
and spiritual phenomena. The Spirit that breathes 
through him and makes him its organ, takes the 
things of his memory and the whole treasury of his 
imagination and experience, and recombines them 
with the figures of its own more vast and illuminated 
perspectives. Consequently, the idiosyncrasies, men- 
tal, moral, and spiritual, the characteristics of the 
individual in his normal condition, are to be traced 
always in the seer, though heightened and intensified. 
Ezekiel is not Isaiah, and neither of these prophets 
retain their simple narrative style when they rise 
into the heights of seership, though their character- 
istics are sublimed without being lost. David passed 
the years of his youth tending his father's flocks on 
the plains of Bethlehem, and so afterwards . in his 
highest moments of inspiration his figures of speech 
are drawn front a shepherd's life and from pastoral 
fields. If his inspiration had become vision, un- 
questionably his figures of speech would have taken 
form and coloring, and unrolled to his eye an objec- 
tive world showing in mystic light " the green pas- 
tures " and " the still waters." 

Now let any one compare the fourth Gospel with 
the Apocalypse, and he will be surprised to find how 
constantly the metaphors of the former pass into the 



THE yOHANNEAN WRITINGS. 75 

latter and become the living figures of its ever shift- 
ing panorama. This is the more remarkable as these 
figures of speech are altogether peculiar and strictly 
Johannean. The fact is illustrative of a profound 
psychological principle, but it is a principle which no 
fabricator of that age would ever have dreamed of 
availing himself of. We will give some very striking 
examples. 

The first chapter of the fourth Gospel, in that por- 
tion of it which opens the personal biography of 
Jesus, describes a scene which evidently glowed viv- 
idly afterwards in the imagination of the Evangelist. 
The Baptist, seeing Jesus coming, waves his hand, 
and says to his disciples, " Behold the Lamb of God 
that taketh away the sin of the world." The mind 
of John dwelt fondly upon the image, for the same is 
repeated soon after and graphically described. The 
next day the Baptist stood, and two of his disciples, 
one of whom was evidently the Evangelist himself. 
On looking on Jesus as He walked^ he saith, " Behold 
the Lamb of God." By none other of the Evangel- 
ists is Jesus ever called the Lamb, and with a single 
exception the figure is used by no other writer of the 
New Testament. It occurs in i Peter i. 19. But at 
the beginning of the fourth Gospel, it evidently de- 
scribes Jesus as the coming sacrifice, and implies as 
well a certain grace of person and charm of manner 
which had won at first sight the heart of John. 

A lamb offered in sacrifice is a beautiful figure of 



je THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

self-oblation, but not likely to be selected by any ^ 
writer under ordinary conditions, as the symbol of 
regal power and authority. But we open the Apoca- 
lypse, and lo ! the image of the Lamb reappears, not 
now as a figure of speech, but in living objective 
form, and around it all the figures of the moving 
panorama are grouped in their rank and order. And 
when the ritual of heaven is described, and we look 
up through "the ten thousand times ten thousand 
and thousands of thousands," and the angels about 
the throne, and the four-and-twenty elders that cast 
down before it their crowns of gold, and the'eye at 
last sees the central figure of this ascending homage, 
it is not an oriental monarch sitting in regal splendor, 

but A X.AMB AS IT HAD BEEN SLAIN. The figure OC- 

curs more than twenty times in the Apocalypse, but 
now always hypostatized. The figure stands con- 
spicuous at the opening of the fourth Gospel, and 
tones it throughout ; the figure hypostatized deter- 
mines the whole drama of the Apocalypse, and draws 
around it the heavenly alleluiahs. 

The doctrine of the Logos, or Word, is not peculiar 
to the Johannean writings, but its form of statement is. 

Nowhere else in the New Testament except the 
Johannean writings, nor indeed in any writing of the 
first century is Jesus Christ called the Logos. In the 
proem of the fourth Gospel the Logos is distinctly 
personified, and in such wise that it has baffled 
the commentators ever since; and in the very first 



THE yOHANNEAN WRITINGS. "JJ 

verse of the Catholic Epistle it is personified again 
in like manner. It ceases to be an abstract term, and 
is something which men have " seen " and " handled." 
This is specially and emphatically Johannean, and, 
as we shall see by and by, was designed to turn 
the divine truth with its boldest and brightest firont 
against the Gnostic heresies. 

We should naturally expect that the Logos would 
reappear in the Apocalypse. It does ; and it is not 
only hypostatized, but dramatized, and goes forth as 
a fierce warrior and an almighty King, armed against 
the enemies of truth, and riding them down with 
garments crimsoned with their blood. 

" I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse ; 
and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and 
True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make 
war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his 
head were many crowns ; and he had a name written 
that no man knew, but he himself. And he was 
clothed in a vesture bathed in blood : and his 
name is called the Logos of God. And the armies 
in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed 
in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth 
goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the 
nations ; and he shall rule them with a rod of iron : 
and he treadeth the wine-press of the fierceness and 
wrath of Almighty God. And he had on his vesture 
and on his thigh a name written. King of kings, and 
Lord of lords." i 

1 Rev. xix. 1 1- 1 6. 



78 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

It is alleged by some of the critics that the Logos 
doctrine was borrowed from the later Platonists, and 
that it fixes the date of the fourth Gospel towards 
the middle of the second century. Here in a work 
acknowledged to be John's by these same critics, the 
Word is not only hypostatized already, but clothed 
with Divine attributes like the Word of the Golden 
Proem. 

Our next illustration is of even more remarkable 
significance. The opening chapters, both of the 
fourth Gospel and of the Catholic Epistle, describe 
the Word as the Beginning and the Ultimation ; as 
existing Iv apxr,^ — in the prime central principles of 
Divine being ; and again as the Word made flesh — 
aap^ iyiv€To^ — as existing in the lowest and outermost 
things. In the Catholic Epistle it is, " That which 
was in the Beginnhigl' and, " That which our eyes 
have seejt and our hands have handled!' This goes 
to the profoundest metaphysics of the New Testa- 
ment. Moreover it is in a form exclusively and 
intensely Johannean. The thought may be gathered 
and deduced elsewhere, but it never runs into this 
peculiar mould. But open the Apocalypse, and this 
profound metaphysic becomes the grandest objective 
reality, rising on the sight in glorified form and with 
overwhelming power and efiulgence. The Beginning 
and the Ultimation, the Alpha and the Omega, ap- 
pears as one like unto the Son of man, his counte- 
nance as the sun shining in his strength, his hairs as 



THE yOHANNEAN WRITINGS, 79 

white as wool, and his feet Hke brass refined and 
burning, — that is. He is divine not only Iv dpxfj — 
in first things, but in their lowest natural forms and 
ultimations. The conception was not only above the 
age, but above all the ages. Its formulation, as found 
in the Johannean writings, is not only original and 
peculiar, but it transcends the profoundest deep of 
Greek metaphysics and the loftiest flights of poetry. 
Another figure which has become common cur- 
rency in the speech of Christendom, but which is 
altogether Johannean in origin, is that of water not 
used as the symbol of baptism, but as representing 
the power of truth to refresh the soul and slake its 
thirst ; and of bread to satisfy its hunger ; making 
Jesu-s Christ, by a bold metaphor, both water and 
bread from heaven. There is nothing of this in the 
synoptics, but it characterizes the fourth Gospel 
throughout. The imagery clung delightfully to the 
mind of the beloved disciple, and those discourses and 
conversations of Jesus in which it abounds are fondly 
remembered and reproduced in all their tenderness. 
In the conversation with the Samaritan woman, the 
Christ is " living water," or, again, a fountain of 
water in the believer bubbling up unto everlasting 
life, — that is perpetually, and diffusing verdure and 
bloom over all the scenery of the soul. He offers 
Himself as food and drink, and so merges the literal 
sense in the spiritual, that some of his followers mis- 
understand Him and go away. " Who can hear such 



8o THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

sayings ? " And in the last jubilant day of the 
Feast of the Tabernacles, when the long winding 
procession brought water from the springs of Siloam, 
circling the altar and pouring it out as they chanted, 
" Behold, we draw water from the wells of salvation," 
a loud voice startles the crowd and commands them. 
Evidently there was a prophet-tone in the words that 
broke in upon the ceremony and arrested it. Jesus 
" stood and cried," " If any man thirst let him come 
unto me and drink. He that believeth on me out of 
his heart shall flow rivers of living water." 

Turn to the Apocalypse, and what before was bold 
metaphor and graphic description passes into the' 
objective scenery of the seer. It is no longer in the 
mind, but visioned as out of the mind ; unrolled as 
the land of Paradise through which crystal streams 
are flowing, between rows of trees, margined with 
eternal green. The streams flow out of " the throne 
of God and of the Lamb," along the streets of the 
New Jerusalem, and on either side are rows of the 
tree of life. The figure often recurs, but now as 
actual water visioned and flowing clear as in the last 
.fervent invitation, " Let him that is athirst come, 
and whosoever will let him take the water of life 
freely," reiterating the very invitation of Christ in 
the Gospel, " If any man thirst let him come unto 
me and drink." The whole is intensely Johannean, 
and could no more have been fabricated by some 
writer of the next century than Lear's jester could 



THE yOHANNEAN WRITINGS, 8 1 

have fabricated a second Iliad. It is beyond the 
range of poetic imagination, and beyond Homer 
himself. 

The Good Shepherd, and the flock as the sheep 
of his pasture, have been the favorite imagery under 
which the Church in all ages has delighted to repre- 
sent the relation of Jesus Christ to his followers. 
But whence is this imagery derived ? Not from the 
twenty-third Psalm, though it occurs there, David 
himself having been called from pastoral life. The 
Church derives it from discourses of Jesus reported 
in the fourth Gospel, and which are not found in 
the synoptics, not merely because they were most 
congenial with the Johannean spirit, but because 
John only of the evangelists was an ear-witness of 
their utterance. The parable of the good shepherd 
was not one of the public proclamations of his minis- 
try in Galilee ; it was uttered in the more private 
colloquial intercourse which he had with the people 
that gathered around him in and about Jerusalem, 
whither He had gone up to attend one of the festivals. 
The Jews were watching Him, and seeking cause for 
arresting Him. "My sheep," said He, "hear my 
voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I am 
the good Shepherd, and know my sheep, and am 
known of mine." And at the next festival He repeats - 
what He had said before : " Ye believe not because 
ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you. My 
sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they fol- 



82 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

low me. And I give unto them eternal life, and they 
shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out 
of my hand." And again, as the door or gate of the 
field, he says, " If any man enter in he shall be saved, 
and shall go in and out, and find pasture." 

The appendix to the fourth Gospel — for such we 
regard the closing chapter — was probably added by 
John's personal disciples from traditions of his dis- 
courses preserved at Ephesus. In it the same imag- 
ery occurs again with the injunction of the Master, 
" Feed my sheep, feed my lambs." 

It is easy to imagine why this imagery passed thus 
fully and spontaneously into the discourse of our 
Saviour. He was brought up at Nazareth ; and the 
vast plain of Esdraelon, with its brooks murmuring 
towards the sea, dotted over with flocks of sheep, the 
shepherds going before them, calling the leaders by 
name, carrying the lambs in his arms, conducting 
them to green spots by the brook-side, or into the 
sheep-fold by night, and into the cool shade at sultry 
noon, must have been the most familiar scenes which 
Jesus looked upon through his youth and opening 
manhood. They arrest the notice of the traveller 
to-day, and bring the peaceful imagery of the fourth 
Gospel freshly to his mind. 

* It would be very strange if we did not find it re- 
produced in the visions of the New Jerusalem. It is 
there ; the vales of Esdraelon idealized and glowing in 
mystic light become the fields into which the Christ 






THE yOHANNEAN WRITINGS. 83 

as the Shepherd of the fold shall lead his flock washed 
in his blood and made white and clean. " They shall 
hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither 
shall the sun light on them nor any heat ; for the 
Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed 
them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of 
waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from their 
eyes." 

Light, as the symbol and representative of truth, 
IS a figure of speech found in almost all classes of 
writing, but it is found in the fourth Gospel as no- 
where else. Jesus Christ is there presented, not 
merely as a teacher to enlighten the minds of men 
with his doctrine, but He becomes the impersonation 
of Light itself, and the very sun of the moral uni- 
verse. This mode of speech characterizes the entire 
fourth Gospel to such an extent that it has seemed to 
many to give it a Zoroastrian tinge, and it is difficult 
to avoid the inference that it has not some tacit ref- 
erence to the Gnosticism of that day. The Baptist 
is a light local and temporary, but the Logos which 
was in the beginning with God, and was God, comes 
into the world as The Light to enlighten every man, 
and John and all other lights pale before it. The 
figure used in this way occurs nowhere in the synop- 
tics, and nowhere in the Epistles, except in the first 
Epistle of John, where God Himself is " Light in 
whom is no darkness at all." ^ In one of the most 

1 I John i. 5. 



84 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

Striking passages of the fourth Gospel the personifi- 
cation is employed early in the morning as Jesus was 
teaching in the temple. At the hour when the sun 
was just rising and flinging his beams aslant the 
gilded dome and roof, and the white marble columns 
possibly suggesting the figure, Jesus declares, " I am 
THE Light of the world." ^ 

We open the Apocalypse, and in the very first 
chapter we find that the figure of the Proem is hypos- 
tatized as the sun itself of the higher mystic world. 
The Logos which came before as The Light to en- 
lighten every one, appears now as one like unto the 
Son of man, his countenance as the sun shining in 
his strength, standing in the midst of the constel- 
lated churches, which like golden candlesticks, bor- 
row their light and trick their beams from Him. 
The figure recurs again and again, but it is no longer 
metaphor. It becomes the central luminary itself, 
difiusing warmth and glory throughout the New 
Jerusalem, which needs no candle, no sun, and no 
moon, because " the Lamb is the Light thereof.^ 

We cite one more instance of a most remarkable 
kind. John alone of all the twelve followed Jesus to 
the cross and stood under it to witness its agonies. 
Therefore he gives details which all the others omit. 
None of the synoptics mention the piercing with the 
spear, but John does it with asseverations which 
show how deeply the sight affected him. 

1 John yiii. }2. 2 Rgy. i. 13-16 ; xxii. 5. 



THE JOHANNEAN WRITINGS. 85 

" One of the soldiers with a spear pierced His 
side, and forthwith came thereout blood and water ; 
and he that saw it bare record, and his record is 
true ; and he knoweth that he saith true ; that ye 
might believe," — evidently referring to the doceti- 
cism of the Gnostics, who denied the real suffering 
of the Christ. And then follows the citation of the 
prophesy, " They shall look on Him whom they 
pierced." ^ 

This quotation is from Zech. xii. 10, and the lan- 
guage, as there applied, has no direct reference to 
Christ, but to the enemies of Jerusalem in her con- 
flict with the heathen nations. John applies it in a 
secondary and mystical sense to the men who cruci- 
fied the Lord. 

In the reappearings of Jesus, in two successive 
scenes, John alone remembers what had so vividly 
impressed his senses, and through them his imagina- 
tion at the cross. "Jesus showed them his hands 
and his side!^ 

Turn now to the Apocalypse, and the same thing 
reappears in the vision of the seer, sublimed and 
intensified. The fact, of which John alone of the 
twelve was the eye-witness, is recalled. Not only so, 
but the same passage from Zechariah is cited in the 
same secondary and mystical sense, and the imagery 
and language of the passage are employed with 
greater fullness and amplitude. "Behold He com- 

1 John xix. 34-37. 



86 THE. FOURTH GOSPEL, 

eth with clouds and every eye shall see Him, and 
they also which pierced Him y and all kindreds of the 
earth shall wail because of Him. Even so, Amen/' 
Both quotations from the same prophecy, made with 
such peculiarity, point indubitably to one and the 
same writer.^ The fact which had impressed the 
senses of John so deeply and tragically, passes into 
the imagery of the seer, where that same Christ 
coming to judgment shall compel those who pierced 
his side to look upon Him in his open and over- 
whelming majesty. Dr. Davidson tries to parry the 
force of this point in a course of remark which we 
can regard as little better than puerile. 

The personal characteristics of the favorite dis- 
ciple are portrayed not less in the Apocalypse than 
in the other Johannean writings. Both the prime 
elements of his character are strongly contrasted, but 
exalted and toned beyond the power of any human 
imagination to commingle and harmonize. No 
chambers of imagery ever opened such treasures 
of wrath, such storm-clouds, forking lightnings, or 
showering down fire and hail and bloody rain. The 
destruction, not of a Samaritan city, but of all the 
enemies of Christianity, both Jewish and Roman, is 
seen through the opening ages, and the New Jeru- 

1 The quotation is doubtless from the Septuagint, — /cai It^i^\^-^ov 
rai irpos /xe avGr oov Karcopx'fio'avro, — " they shall look on me whom they 
have pierced." In both cases, in the quotation in the fourth Gospel 
and in the Apocalypse, the original is changed from the first person 
to the third. 



THE yOHANNEAN WRITINGS, 8/ 

salem descending beyond adorned and beloved as a 
bride. The grand and terrific heightened to super- 
human intensity, set off in contrast with images of 
peace more sweet and lovely than the earth alone 
can furnish, all are there. But the critics mistake, 
we think, when they suppose the personal feelings 
and passions of the writer are in the Apocalypse. 
In the seer they have passed beyond that stage alto- 
gether. His personal genius is there superhumanly 
exalted and idealized, for he speaks not himself but 
is spoken out of ; and the divine pencil takes its col- 
orings from a human treasure-house, w^here they had 
been abundantly stored up, and paints the realities 
which were to be, and whose future the course of 
Christian history has ever since been filling up. 

The style of the Johannean writings, — a subject 
on which the critics have grievously stumbled, — is 
exceedingly variant. But it varies as the psychologi- 
cal condition of the historian differs from that of the 
seer. One writes from his own natural conscious- 
ness. The other writes from a profounder conscious- 
ness than the natural one, and the style is not his 
own, though colored by his native genius. One may 
be perfectly simple and prosaic ; the other, when es- 
sentially prophetic, is raised to a sphere of thought 
where the wing of imagination never dares to play, 
and his style may assume a mystic grandeur beyond 
that of ordinary poetry. 

But we come to another peculiarity of the Apoca- 



88 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

lypse, and one which seems at first to distinguish it 
strongly from the other Johannean writings, we mean 
the " bad Greek," which the critics have made so- 
much account of. This, too, when narrowly scruti- 
nized, remands us to one of the profounder principles 
of mental action. 

When men pass from a normal to a trance con- 
dition, or one essentially abnormal, and speak from 
pure spontaneity, they almost always speak in their 
vernacular tongue, seldom in a language which has 
been acquired later. If a German who had acquired 
English should somnambulize, he would inevitably 
fall back upon the speech which he learned from his 
mother's lips, and to which his organs and his inte- 
rior thought had always been attuned. The reason 
is plain. In these abnormal moods the voluntary 
powers are in abeyance, and the involuntary are in 
full play, and will determine to no speech which is 
foreign to them and artificial, but only to their own 
native forms and idioms.^ 

It is a very remarkable fact that the bad Greek of 
the Apocalypse is Greek which has been Hebraized, 
It is full of Hebrew idioms, which has led the critics 
strongly to suspect that it was composed originally 
in Hebrew. Bishop Middleton says that if this could 

1 Dr. Rush, of Philadelphia, who practiced among the German 
population, said that people who had not spoken their native tongue 
for thirty years, on their death-beds, with the eternal scene drawing 
nigh, would talk and pray in the language of their childhood. 



THE yOHANNEAN WRITINGS, 89 

be admitted all the difficulties on this score would 
vanish at once. 

It may not only be admitted, but assumed as ex- 
ceeHingly probable, that the Apocalypse, if written 
by John Iv Tri/cv/xart, was produced in one of the He- 
brew dialects. The Syro-Chaldee was his vernacu- 
lar, the same which he spoke on the shores of the 
Galilean lake, and associated with which all the 
memories of his childhood, youth, and early man- 
hood, and the natural imagery which enshrined them, 
were stored away in the treasuries of his mind. All 
his intercourse with Jesus had been in this language, 
and all the discourses he had ever heard from Him 
were in the same dialect. It would be strange indeed 
if after the ascension of Jesus, when intercourse with 
the beloved disciple was renewed, it had been in a 
foreign language, and not in the one which they used 
together when he leaned on the Master's bosom. 
Inevitably, and by psychological laws, when he wrote 
Iv TTv^viLCkTi^ that is, not by his own will, but out of a 
profounder spontaneity and under the dictation of 
the very lips that charmed his younger manhood, the 
Divine influx would not flow into Greek forms, but 
into the forms of his native tongue. 

The congruity of the Johannean writings with each 
other and with the character of the favorite disciple, 
is important not merely as a most decisive argument 
for the genuineness of these writings, but as helping 



90 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

greatly in their mutual interpretation and in that of 
the whole New Testament. For it cannot well be 
denied that the Johannean theology is inmost like 
the soul in the body, being the central light wKich 
penetrates, involves, and transfigures the whole. 



I 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE SCOPE, PURPOSE, AND SPIRIT OF THE APOCA- 
LYPSE. 

A T 7E reserve for a separate chapter a difficulty 
^ ^ raised by modern criticism pertaining to the 
congruity and identity of authorship of the Apoca- 
lypse and the fourth Gospel. It is this : The temper 
of the one is wholly unlike that of the other. The 
temper of the fourth Gospel is sweet and beautifully 
Christian ; the temper of the Apocalypse is fierce, 
vindictive, and Jewish. Baur sees in the Apocalypse 
abundant evidence for his theory of two hostile par- 
ties in the primitive Church, — the Jewish party, at 
the head of which was Peter ; the Gentile party, 
at the head of which was Paul ; and of course John 
wrote in the interest of the Jewish party, recognizing 
throughout the Apocalypse only twelve Apostles, 
ignoring the thirteenth, telling the churches that 
Paul claimed to be an Apostle when he was not, 
and was a "liar" (Rev. ii. 2). We enter not into any 
examination of Baur's theory, which a late writer we 
think has put forever at rest,^ but the purpose and 
temper of a writing, which comes to us from the man 

1 Fisher's Essays on the Origin of Christianity^ specially Essay IV. 



92 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

who shared most fully the confidence of the Lord 
Jesus Christ, becomes to us a subject of the deepest 
interest. 

At what time was it written ? is a question of some 
importance, and bears incidentally on its interpreta- 
tion. On this point the traditions of the primitive 
Church are all in one direction: the Church, that 
is, of the century succeeding the apostolic age ; tra- 
ditions so early that they almost become the testi- 
mony of ear-witnesses. It was written, according to 
the earliest testimony, during the reign of Domitian, 
or about a. d. 96. Irenaeus, a contemporary of 
John s disciples, says the Revelation " was seen not 
long ago, almost in our age, at the end of the reign 
of Domitian." Melito, bishop of Sardis, one of the 
churches to whom the Apocalypse was originally ad- 
dressed, writes as early as a. d. 177, and receives 
the Apocalypse as that of John ; and Justin, writing 
in 140, and at the city of Ephesus, the scene of 
John's last labors, and when hundreds were alive 
who had seen and heard him, refers to the book, and 
quotes it. Tertullian, about a. d. 200, says, " We 
have churches which are disciples of John ; " and re- 
ferring to the Apocalypse, " The succession of bishops 
traced to the original will assure us that John is the 
author." Clement's testimony is to the same purpose. 
The churches which had the best means of knowing, 
not only testify unanimously to the Johannean au- 
thorship of the Apocalypse, but also to its date ; and 



SCOPE, ETC., OF THE APOCALYPSE, 93 

the testimony begins so early that it is virtually that 
of men who had seen the beloved disciple, hung upon 
his lips, welcomed him home from his banishment in 
Patmos, and saw him laid in his final rest at Ephesus. 
It is concurrent to the same result. — John's banish- 
ment was in the persecutions under Domitian, at 
which time he had his visions ; that is, about a. d. 
96, the last of that tyrant's reign. 

Why have subsequent criticisms, some of them 
ancient but most of them modern, endeavored to set 
aside this early testimony } Almost solely for the 
reason that the eleventh chapter of the Apocalypse 
is supposed to refer to Jerusalem and the temple as 
if they were yet standing. Jerusalem was destroyed 
A. D. y2. Therefore — such is the logic, — the book 
must have been written before that time. The ban- 
ishment to Patmos must have been during the perse- 
cutions of Nero, or about a. d. 66, 

We shall see that the supposed reference to Jerusa- 
lem and the temple is an argument which has not the 
least validity. Aside from this, it is to be observed 
that the persecution under Nero was local, and there is 
no historical evidence that it extended to Asia Minor. 
Then there is no probability that John was at Ephe- 
sus so early as 66, or that the seven churches, with 
the exception of the church at Ephesus, had even an 
existence. Paul preached at Ephesus a. d. 55, and 
gathered a church there. About three years after (58), 
on his return to Jerusalem from Corinth, he meets at 



94 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

Miletus the elders from Ephesus, when occurred that 
scene of tenderest pathos which Luke has described. 
In the year 62 Paul writes his letter to the Ephesians 
from Rome. In the year 6j he is at Ephesus again, 
and writes thence his letter to Titus. In the year 68 
he is in prison again at Rome, where he was beheaded 
under Nero. These dates may not all be exact. We 
take them from the careful chronology of Conybeare 
and Howson, and we have no doubt they are approx- 
imately correct. Through the whole there is no al- 
lusion to John at Ephesus or to the constellated 
churchgs of Asia Minor. We hold the supposition 
utterly baseless that so early as the year 66 Chris- 
tianity had thus spread through Asia Minor ; that 
seven churches had been founded there and passed 
through stages of growth, corruption, and declension, 
like some of the seven churches to which John first 
published his revelations. The internal evidence, as 
well as the historical, point to the close of the cen- 
tury as the true date. When John wrote the Apoc- 
alypse, therefore, Paur had been dead twenty-eight 
years. John, at the time of writing, was placed over 
a church which Paul had founded and nourished with 
vast sacrifice and toil. John had entered into his la- 
bors and built on his foundation. Even allowing there 
might have ever been any division between them 
— of which we have not a shred of evidence — the 
notion that John would go twenty-eight years out of 
his way to shout "liar," over the grave of the great 



SCOPE, Era, OF the apocalypse. 95 

martyr, is rather too absurd for refutation. In the 
passage cited reference is made not to one man but 
to a class of men. *' Thou hast tried them," he writes 
to the church at Ephesus, " which say they are apos- 
tles and are not, and hast found them liars." That 
the Cerinthian Gnostics, who we know were at Eph- 
esus, and who pretended to have revelations from 
the Christ which superseded the apostolic Chris- 
tianity, are the persons here alluded to seems be- 
yond all reasonable question. 

To estimate aright the scope and temper of the 
Apocalypse we must have some adequate conception 
of the state of seership from which it professes to 
have been produced. Professor Davidson, who writes 
learnedly about this book, has no other notion of that 
state of mind than the natural faculties excited to 
unwonted fervor and ecstasy. That " the visions and 
their coloring were given, is an assumption," he says, 
" which deprives the author of consciousness, and is 
contrary to the analogy of prophecy." It no more 
deprives the author of his consciousness, than the 
scenery of nature given every day to our natural 
vision, deprives us of our consciousness ; and it is not 
only in analogy with prophecy, but it is prophecy 
itself in the exercise of its highest function. The 
seer has opened within him a more interior con- 
sciousness, to which the scenery of a higher world 
is unrolled. That scenery he can describe, and its 
changes he can note and chronicle, while his con- 



96 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

sciousness may be as vivid and more so than that 
of the astronomer when looking at the stars. He 
sees events in their causes ; in those spiritual states 
and conditions that lie behind and within all material 
phenomena, and out of which material phenomena 
are evolved. Those states and conditions he sees 
represented by appropriate symbols. Those symbols 
may be given entire, or they may be in his own 
memory, the treasures of his own imagination ; as 
in the case of John, whose mind was aglow with the 
imagery of the Savior's discourses fondly preserved 
and dwelt upon. In either case they are no longer 
his own, after they have passed into scenery which 
symbolizes the spiritual truths and realities of which 
all earthly realities are only the outcome and ultima- 
tion. To illustrate: the seer beholds in vision the 
sun in sackcloth and the moon turned into blood. 
Does this foretell an eclipse of the sun and moon in 
the natural world } Nothing of the kind. It repre- 
sents the divine light and love extinguished in hu- 
man souls, and the woes and calamities that are sure 
to follow. He sees a conqueror, whose name is Faith- 
ful and True, riding upon a white^ horse with a sharp 
sword issuing from his mouth. Does this mean that 
we are to look in the natural world for a man on 
horseback with the same appearance and name ? 
Nothing of the kind. It represents plainly Divine 
Truth in its triumphal power. He sees a city lying 
waste, and the temple in it about to be thrown down. 



SCOPE, ETC., OF THE APOCALYPSE. 97 

Does this mean that some city answering to it in ap- 
pearance is to be destroyed ? Nothing of the kind. 
It means that a system of religion is to be over- 
thrown whose worship has become false, and whose 
unitizing life has gone. In short, the psychological 
condition of the seer is such that he sees spiritual 

THINGS REPRESENTED BY NATURAL THINGS. Wc shall 

turn his vision into delirious nonsense when we in- 
terpret him as representing natural things by natural 
things. 

And yet this is precisely what a long series of in- 
terpreters, ending with Professor Davidson, have been 
trying to do. Swedenborg is the only interpreter we 
have ever met with who does not flounder in this 
interminable slough. He keeps consistently on the 
spiritual plane, and though we do not pretend to un- 
derstand his entire exegesis, we believe his method 
is the only rational one for interpreting a purely 
symbolical book, and that in the work under consid- 
eration, it unfolds some of the profoundest truths 
that ever searched the nature of man. 

The eleventh chapter speaks of "the temple of 
God," as seen in vision, and which the angel was to 
measure with a reed, and of the great city which 
spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where the 
Lord was crucified: This, say the critics, must mean 
Jerusalem ; therefore Jerusalem and its temple must 
have been standing at the time. Why do not these 
critics keep on with this style of exegesis instead of 
7 



98 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

playing fast and loose with it ? What do they make 
of the two witnesses in this self-same city, which 
were also " the two olive-trees and the two candle- 
sticks which stand before the Lord," and which have 
power to shut heaven that it rain not for a thousand 
two hundred and sixty days ; whose mouths emitted 
fire that devoured their enemies, and who have power 
over the waters to turn them into blood ? Were these 
two remarkable persons living in Jerusalem in the 
days of Nero ? And if the Jerusalem of the eleventh 
chapter with the temple therein, was the veritable 
stone-mason work which Titus captured and de- 
stroyed in A. D. 72, pray what was the masonry of the 
New Jerusalem of the twenty-second chapter which 
was to succeed it and stand upon its ruins ? Most 
remarkable mason-work indeed ! A city coming 
down ready built out of the sky, e^^ctly cubical in 
shape, its length and breadth and height equal each 
to twelve thousand furlongs ! A city, whose walls 
and buildings were fifteen hundred miles high, must 
have had a very w^onderful and original style of archi- 
tecture. 

There is no end to these bewildering fantasies 
when we try to follow the method of these critics, 
and find in the Apocalypse literal cities and temples, 
or such people of flesh and blood as Nero, Titus, 
Vespasian, and Napoleon Bonaparte ; or Roman, 
Parthian, Saracen, and French armies in full cos- 
tume. When we make the natural imagery in it rep- 



SCOPE, ETC., OF THE APOCALYPSE. 99 

resent natural persons and .things, the confusion be- 
comes worse and worse confounded. When we make 
natural things represent spiritual things, and those 
only, light and order will begin to appear. 

After the prologue or address to the constellated 
churches, the Apocalypse naturally falls into three 
divisions. There are three successive revelations 
and scenic representations of things that were to be. 
In the first revelation the Jewish religion is the 
theme. The quality of its interior life, of its entire 
system of faith and worship, is explored and laid 
open ; its consummation and dissolution are de- 
scribed, and the quality of that remnant which are to 
be saved out of it and given to the Lamb. The 
preparation for judgment, and the execution thereof, 
are symbolized in successive groups of sublime and 
terrible imagery. This occupies the book as we read 
it from the fourth to the twelfth chapters inclusive. 
The Jewish ecclesiasticism, which had become cor- 
rupt and apostate by the sensualization of its faith 
and worship, is typified by Sodom or Egypt, in which 
the Lord is crucified ; that is, in which the Divine 

Life is extinguished. 

» 

In the second revelation the Roman religion is 
evidently the th'^me. It is the city of Babylon, in 
which the Great Harlot sits upon seven hills. The 
perversion of all faith, the falsification of all truth 
used for self-exaltation and arbitrary power ; its cruel 
and depraving influence ; the divine judgment that 



ICO THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

explores and lays open its hideous qualities and 
dooms it to hell, we understand to occupy the book 
from the thirteenth to the twentieth chapter inclu- 
sive. 

These false religions, being adjudged and cleared 
out of the way by the conquering power of the 
Divine Word, the hindrances are removed for the 
New Jerusalem to descend. The Old Jerusalem has 
vanished, and Babylon has fallen, and now Christian- 
ity, the reign of peace and brotherhood, the visible 
presence of God with men, is to succeed them. It 
appears to the seer objectively, symbolized by the 
same sweet and beautiful imagery which glows in the 
discourses of the fourth Gospel, and in the language 
of the old prophets ; only what the old prophets saw 
in twilight, John sees in serene and mellow noontide 
falling down from the throne of God and of the 
Lamb. The New Jerusalem has its length and 
breadth and height exactly equal ; its system of truth 
and doctrine, that is, neither perverted, nor distorted, 
nor corrupted, is perfectly symmetrical ; and the city 
depends not on the lights which men kindle, nor on 
the light of nature, for "the Lamb is the light there- 
of" The whole scenery bathed in mystic splendor, 
is beyond the reach of art, beyond anything which 
human genius ever produced from its richest treas- 
uries. 

Such are the three divisions of the Apocalypse, 
though the first and second interblend imperceptibly 



SCOPE, ETC., OF THE APOCALYPSE, lOI 

with each other, for the reason that systems of false 
rehgion which are there explored and adjudged, have 
much in common that is corrupt and bad. In the 
first division the baleful consequences of separating 
religion from life are described as they never were 
before or since. The religious faith which has no 
love in it, in which the last throb of humanity has 
ceased to beat, leaving it hard, cruel, and deformed, 
has lost the human features and the human shape, 
and has become a Great Dragon, drawing the stars 
from heaven, putting out the benign lights in the 
firmament of the soul. The worship without faith, 
rehearsing its dreary litanies, parading its gorgeous 
forms after they have been emptied of all divine 
meaning, after all true knowledge of God has leaked 
out of them, and contempt and denial have come in 
the place of it, to which the sun becomes black as 
sackcloth of hair and the moon becomes as blood, 
has ceased to bless and to save ; and the moral and 
spiritual chaos that follows is imaged in the falling 
stars, and the mountains moved from their places. 
All shades and degrees of the faith in which there 
is no love of man, and the worship in which there 
is no knowledge or love of God, are laid open and 
described. And last of all the religion whose doc- 
trines and forms are used for self-aggrandizement and 
self-exaltation, in which human ambitions and hatreds 
are enthroned in the place of God, is explored, and 
its interior quality disclosed. It is the ecclesiastical 



I02 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

power which blasphemously usurps the seat of the 
divine judgment to tyrannize over the minds and 
bodies of men, always full of abominations and drunk 
with the blood of the saints and the blood of the 
martyrs. This is the great harlot of Babylon sitting 
on her seven hills. It is the love of power subsi- 
dizing the religious sentiment to its infernal ends, 
and using its machinery not to bless but to oppress 
mankind, — the worst of the seven plagues that have 
fallen upon them. 

That the Jewish and Roman religions are here 
explored, and their interiors exposed and adjudged 
under the " seven trumpets " of God, has been the 
opinion of Protestant expositors generally. The 
Jews had crucified the Lord spiritually before they 
nailed the Lord Jesus to the cross. Within their 
gorgeous ceremonials the Divine Life was extinct, 
and charity and humanity had ceased to pulsate 
through them. Pagan Rome was sitting on her seven 
hills drunk with the blood of martyrs, and a pagan- 
ized Christianity was to succeed her with like power 
over the souls and bodies of men. It is important 
to observe, however, that not persons nor places, 
not Jerusalem and its pharisees, nor Rome with its 
emperors, nor the Roman Church with its papal 
tyrannies, are to be looked for exclusively in the 
Apocalypse. Not persons, but states of mind and de- 
pravities of heart infesting our human nature univer- 
sally, are described in the symboHzation of the seer ; 



SCOPE, ETC., OF THE APOCALYPSE. 103 

depravities of which all the Neros and Napoleons are 
the visible incarnation, and all ecclesiasticisms, used 
to serve the ends of human ambition and pride, are 
the body and form. 

Faith severed from life, dogma hard and frozen 
with no pulse of charity in it, worship, whose form 
stands forth as a gorgeous shell emptied alike of 
the knowledge of God and the love of man, — these 
are the same in quality, whether we call them by 
Jewish or Christian names, and the hatreds and 
strifes which they engender in the name of religion, 
are the plagues that fall upon men ; out of these 
comes the pale horse, and the name of him that sits 
thereon is Death, and hell follows with him, and power 
is given him over the earth to kill with sword and 
with hunger and with death and with the beasts of 
the earth. 

Babylon is Rome ; — human pride and ambition 
usurping the seat of God, and blasphemously sending 
forth anathemas in his name. But every church 
which has done the same is also Rome, and is apos- 
tate. The fires of Smithfield are not more lurid than 
the fires of Geneva ; and the plagues that fall on the 
bodies of men are not worse than those which blight 
the soul. Not anything in the natural world, whether 
of men or cities, appears in the vision of the seer. 
But the infernal depravities, born of our uncleansed 
human selfhood, latent alike, reader, in your nature 
and in mine, subsidizing even the religious sentiment 



I04 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

to the service of its own lust, aggrandizement and 
glory, and pouring out the seven plagues on the 
earth and on the sea, are the Apocalypse of woe irre- 
spective of person and time ; and if we read it, more 
willing to be searched beneath it than to judge others 
by it, no book that ever was written would open into 
more startling sunlight the pages of our book of life. 
There is no priesthood, Roman or Protestant, which 
does not need betimes the exploration of its trumpet 
voices, to show them whether they are using the 
forms of Christianity for their own power and glory, 
or only to bless and save mankind. There is no 
church, Roman or Protestant, which does not need 
to have its ruling motive and that of all its members 
revealed to its consciousness ; and if religion is some- 
thing apart from life, if faith is divorced from works, 
held and professed only for a man's personal salvation, 
and not made warm and radiant with all the charities 
and humanities, they should find themselves revealed 
in this book quite as much as the dynasties that have 
passed away. Not material weapons, not flesh and 
blood, but evils and delusions of the heart and mind, 
hinder the descent of the New Jerusalem. 

And the New Jerusalem is neither a lo ! here nor a 
lo ! there. It is not an ecclesiasticism, but a form of 
faith, of doctrine, and of worship, so warm with the 
love of the Lord that He abides in the soul, the river 
of its peace, the fountain of its charities, the inspira- 
tion of its tender humanities, after all the old Juda- 



SCOPE, ETC, OF THE APOCALYPSE, 105 

ism and Romanism have been adjudged and cast 
away. It is Christianity unitizing God, .man, and 
nature ; making our cleansed and renovated human- 
ity the tabernacle of God with men, and thence 
turning the earth into Eden, and making it the reflex 
image of the skies. It descends into all minds, and 
thence into all the ecclesiasticisms, as we renounce 
our Judaism and our heathenism for the spirit of uni- 
versal brotherhood, and then " the nations of them 
that are saved do walk in the light of it, and the kings 
of the earth do bring their honor and glory into it." 

The worship and ritual of heaven, and thence of 
the New Jerusalem descending out of it, in contrast 
with the worship whose interior truths have been 
falsified or lost, is set forth in one of those chapters 
which open into the serene vistas of the higher 
world. The heart becomes tender and warm in the 
light which comes down through it from the cen- 
tral glory. *^ God and the Lamb " is the twofold 
designation of the object of the Christian's supreme 
worship and love. This does not imply any divided 
homage, but the Lamb is a predicate of the one 
divine Being, and sets forth his relations to the creat- 
ures He has made. Its essential meaning is sacri- 
fice, and coupled with the divine name it signifies 
that God himself is one great sacrifice for man. Not 
alone in the sacrifice on Calvary He gives himself 
away for the expiation and forgiveness of sin. Be- 
yond its solemn heights and away through the door 



I06 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

opened into heaven, He appears as the essential sac- 
rifice given hourly for the redemption of the world. 
Ever going out of himself, and coming down to our 
lowly condition, underlying all our weaknesses, and 
helping us bear up our weary burdens, present in all 
our sufferings and suffering with us, sinking himself 
out of sight beneath our mortal infirmities, clothing 
himself with them, as it were, that He may help us 
the more ; rejected, injured, wounded, grieved away 
by our hardness of heart and blindness of mind, his 
very life killed out of us when striving most to enter 
and save us, — such is the eternal sacrifice of God ; 
and so when we look up to the throne with eyes made 
wet with repentance, we see not the thunder-clouds 
of wrath but a lamb as it had been slain. 

Truth, as seen by the pure intellect, is white and 
silvery ; but truth transfused and made chromatic 
with the divine love is golden ; and when it rules 
right royally over the conscience and the life, it 
crowns us, and we wear it as our diadem of praise. 
But how prone we are to wear it as our personal 
adornment ; as something which we have wrought 
out and perfected, and so make it our crown of pride, 
to draw with it the admiration and applause of the 
crowd ! Hence all our priestly ambitions and all the 
selfish motives by which the rites of worship have 
been made aglow with strange fire. Hence the con- 
troversies that have been waged only for personal 
victory. Hence our pulpit eloquence is so prevail- 



SCOPE, ETC., OF THE APOCALYPSE. lO/ 

ingly an exhibition of self-love or the love of popular 
applause, and hence our churches are gathered ad- 
miringly around the preacher who expands so largely 
with the breath of praise, that the Lord Jesus Christ 
is not seen at all, but is kept behind him out of 
sight. But when we get gleams of the ritual of 
heaven, the elders who wear crowns of gold cast 
them down at the feet of Him that sitteth on the 
throne, saying : ^* Thou, O Lord, art worthy." The 
whole scene, both in the description and the sym- 
bolic meaning, is impressive and grand beyond all 
human conception, and we never read it without 
being ashamed of the strut and vanity of our ecclesi- 
astical pomps so faintly chromatic with the divine love, 
nor without an aspiration that the crowns we wear of 
so lurid and fiery a lustre may be exchanged betimes 
for the crowns of gold, fit to be cast down in that 
beautiful ceremonial which ascribes "blessing and 
honor and glory and power unto him that sitteth on 
the throne and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever." 

How stands the question, then, as regards the spirit 
and temper of the Apocalypse 1 Is a book which 
describes the consequences of divorcing religion from 
life, and worship from humanity, and dogma from 
charity, foreshowing the states of mind which ulti- 
mate in baleful results by a symbolization, compared 
with which Homer's battle-pictures are feeble and 
tame, — written in the interest of humanity or not ? 
Is the book Jewish in spirit which depicts what was 



I08 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

false and evil In Judaism, and doomed the Jewish 
Church to its downfall? It is vain to cite its im- 
agery of retributive wrath, such as '' the wrath of the 
Lamb," " the wine-press of the fierceness and wrath 
of Almighty God," as if this were descriptive of the 
temper of the Divine mind, and not rather the results 
of retributive law in complete operation. That is not 
a clear and healthful, but rather a confused and weak 
moral sentiment which revolts against the most thor- 
ough exploration of the hiding-places of sin, and the 
most faithful portraiture of its nature and conse- 
quences. All that the Apocalypse described in the 
realm of causes has had its fulfillment in history. All 
the thunder-clouds which it painted as hanging over 
the future Church, have broken upon it with their 
burden of plague and lightning and great hail. And 
beyond those thunder-clouds, and only as they clear 
the horizon, has the New Jerusalem been seen to 
descend. If it is cruel and vindictive to lay open to 
our gaze the virus that lurks in false religion or in the 
uncleansed human heart, and thence poisons the rela- 
tions of life, making the sweetest fountains run gall 
and turning the rivers into blood, then the spirit of 
the Apocalypse is bad. But If it is good for men or 
for a church to see as in a mirror, the evils that lurk 
within them, and if unresisted shut them ofi" from 
heaven both here and hereafter, then the Apocalypse 
is one of the most humane in spirit of any book that 
ever was addressed to the human conscience. 



SCOPE, ETC, OF THE APOCALYPSE. 109 

Long before our civil war, caused by the rebellion 
of the slave power against the American government, 
some of our poet-prophets foretold the conflict and 
the calamities which it would involve. In the evils 
of slavery, and the states of mind which it engen- 
dered, they saw an Apocalypse of woe, and described 
it in appropriate imagery. Herein they prophesied 
not from a spirit of cruelty or vindictiveness, but 
from a spirit of humanity and mercy. No strains 
more tender and humane can be found in the com- 
pass of modern literature, than the strains of Whit- 
tier and Lowell ; and yet both prophesied against our 
modern Babylon in types which come as near to 
those of the Apocalypse as they could well do with- 
out passing into the objective scenery of the seer. 
Take the following examples from Whittier : — 

"Take your slavery-blackened vales, 
Give us but our own free gales 
Blowing on our thousand sails. 

"Live like paupers mean and vile 
On the fruits of unpaid toil, 
Locusts of your glorious soil. 

" Live if it be life to dwell 
In your tyrant citadel, 
Mined beneath by fires from hell. 

"Our bleak hills shall bud and blow, 
Vines our rocks shall overgrow, 
Plenty in our valleys flow. 



no THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

"And when vengeance lights your skies, 
Hither shall ye turn your eyes, 
As the damned on Paradise/' 

" Hold while ye may your struggling slaves, and burden God's free 
air 
With woman's shriek beneath the lash, and manhood's wild despair ; 
Cling closer to the cleaving curse that writes upon your plains # 
The blasting of Almighty wrath against a land of chains." 

Or this from Lowell : — 

" Out from the land of bondage 'tis decreed our slaves shall go, 
And signs to us are offered as erst to Pharaoh ; 
If we are blind, their exodus, like Israel's of yore, 
Through a Red Sea is doomed to be whose surges are of gore." 

The inspiration of prophecy, and of poetry which 
becomes prophecy because the voice of the divine 
justice speaks through it, approximate both in style 
and spirit. They divine by a more unerring vision 
the malign nature of moral and spiritual evil, and 
select by the same vision the things in nature most 
fit to represent and shadow it forth. Hence the poet, 
who is not a mere sentimentalist, approaches the 
state of seership and sees nature, both in her baleful 
and benignant phases, the exponent of man in his 
infernal or his heavenly states ; humanity, in fact, 
turned inside out ; and, in the symbolism which he 
employs, representing spiritual things by natural 
things, he only gives to the human soul, and thence 
to churches, societies, and communities, which are 
the collective man, the mysteries that lie within 



SCOPE, ETC., OF THE APOCALYPSE. Ill 

them ; warning them of evils which have not yet 
passed into history and had their ultimations in 
heaven or hell. " The wrath of the Lamb poured 
out without mixture from the cup of his indignation," 
describes not the essence of the Deity but the aspect 
of his nature towards men in those false religions 
which quench his mercy and love ; even as the poet 
who sings of the Eternal Goodness as few poets have 
ever done, sings also of " the blasting of Almighty 
wrath against a land of chains." 



CHAPTER V. 

THE WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 

T T becomes important to survey one moment the 
-■- theatre over which Christianity extended its 
sway during the first two. centuries. The Roman 
empire was bounded by the Euphrates on the east 
and the Atlantic ocean on the west ; by the Danube 
on the north and by the African deserts on the south, 
while in the northwest it crossed the channel and in- 
cluded Britain then sunk in barbarism. The peoples 
were separated by vast varieties of climate, manners, i 
language, local governments and religions. There 
were the voluptuousness of the East and the hardi- 
ness of the West. There were the hot blood of the 
South and the cold blood of the North. There were 
the languages of Demosthenes and of Cicero ; there 
was the Hebrew and its cognates heard throughout 
the East in the worship of the synagogues and in the 
marts of trade, and there were the horrid gutturals 
of the savage in the groves of Germany and on the 
banks of the Rhine. 

Before the close of the second century, Christian- 
ity had penetrated this vast region so as to streak 
the darkness everywhere with light. Churches had 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY, II 3 

sprung up east, west, north, and south. It had even 
passed over the Euphrates into the great Parthian 
empire. It had become firmly fixed in nearly all the 
great cities and centres of population, and thence 
ramified through the surrounding country. The 
magnificent Roman roads, radiating from the eternal 
city throughout the empire over which the life of the 
world poured its turbid streams, wonderfully facili- 
tated this early diffusion of Christianity. By the 
year 175 it had spread through Syria, through lesser 
Asia, through Greece and the islands of the Medi- 
terranean, and entering Egypt it had travelled up the 
Nile. It was established at Rome, and thence it had 
gone south and skirted the southern shores of the 
Mediterranean even into the heart of Mauritania. It 
had entered Gaul, and had flourishing churches at 
Lyons and Vienna. Churches had sprung up in all 
these provinces, sundered some of them from each 
other by the space of two thousand miles, sundered 
too by diversities of language and manners, but 
united internally by a spiritual bond, and having 
common traditions whose lines converged towards 
one majestic person who had appeared in Palestine. 
Starting now with the last quarter of the second 
century what do we find } We find a canon of 
Scripture received and established in all these 
churches without exception. We mean by this that 
certain books, regarded sui generis, elevated far above 

the level of common literature, were universally ap- 
8 



114 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

pealed to as commanding authority in all matters 
of life an\i doctrine, and read as Holy Scripture in 
the churches when they came together for worship. 
Prominent in this canon of Scripture were the four 
Gospels, as we have them, and in the order in which 
we have them received as authentic and genuine, and 
as a legacy to these churches from the hands that 
wrote them. It is the testimony not of an individual 
here and there. It is the unanimous testimony of an 
entire generation. Clement of Alexandria in Egypt, 
Tertullian at Carthage, Irenaeus at Lyons in Gaul, 
Polycrates at Ephesus, and Theophilus at Antioch, 
either quote the four Gospels, or refer to them, not as 
describing their individual faith, but the faith of the 
churches throughout the then civilized world. Their 
testimony is not their own merely, but that of the 
churches thus scattered and separated, whose lines 
of tradition are unbroken, and all converging to a 
common centre.^ 

How long must these books have been in circula- 
tion to be thus unanimously and universally re- 
ceived } It will flash upon almost any man's com- 
mon sense that they could not then have been recent 
and modern, that they must date back more than 
twenty-five or even fifty years, and that the notion 
that any one of them originated or took its final 

1 Read Norton's work ; Fisher's admirable Essays on the Super- 
natural Origin of Christianity^ Essay ii. ; or see the evidence con- 
cisely put in Tischendorf 's tract ; Wenn wurden unsere Evangelien 
verfasst? 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY, I15 

form after the middle of the century, and thus sud- 
denly found its way as Holy Scripture into churches 
of different languages, and a thousand miles apart, is 
one of the wildest absurdities. 

But look at the matter in something more of de- 
tail. Who and what were the generation of Chris- 
tian believers living in the last quarter of the second 
century ? Many of them were men and women who 
received their Christian faith and nurture from the 
men who had see7t the Apostles themselves and sat at 
their feet. 

The churches at Lyons and Vienna in Gaul in the 
year i JJ were called to endure a persecution so cruel 
and vindictive, that it seemed not to have been in- 
flicted by men but by wolves in the shape of men. 
After the storm had spent its rage these churches 
sent a letter to the churches in Asia Minor describing 
the calamity that had come upon them. Eusebius 
preserves copious extracts from this letter. It is in a 
triumphant strain, and rises sometimes to a fervid el- 
oquence. This letter quotes the fourth Gospel, once 
a whole passage verbatimy and it quotes the Apoca- 
lypse not less than three times. But more than this. 
Not only the language of the Scriptures enters largely 
and spontaneously into it, but their very life throbs 
through the sentences and compels the conviction 
that these people had the New Testament, and read 
it as we read it, and bathed their inmost souls in its 
spirit. 



Il6 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

Who were the teachers of this church at Lyons in 
177 ? One was the aged bishop Pothinus, passed 
now his ninetieth year with his streaming gray hairs, 
led forth to death for the faith he loved. He was a 
boy twelve years old while John was living at Ephe- 
sus ; he had lived in Asia Minor through his boy- 
hood and younger manhood ; he must have seen and 
conversed with the companions of the Apostles, and 
he was old enough to have seen and conversed with 
the beloved disciple himself Another teacher of this 
church was Irenaeus, the associate of the aged Po- 
thinus. Irenseus says the Gospel was transmitted to 
them in writing and he goes on to specify the fourth 
Gospel as published by John " while he dwelt at 
Ephesus in Asia." He cites the four Gospels as we 
have them, and calls them " the pillar and support of 
the Church and the breath of life." 

Who was Irenaeus } Look over the map and you 
will find the city of Smyrna a few hours' journey 
from Ephesus. There at Smyrna was one of the 
constellated churches, and over it presided the saint- 
ly and venerable Polycarp, the disciple of John. 
Polycarp sat at the feet of the beloved disciple and 
others who had seen the Lord Jesus, and he heard 
them recount over and over the works which Jesus 
did and the speech which fell from his lips. Irenaeus 
was a disciple of Polycarp, and heard the same things 
over from him, and he tells us how they agreed with 
what yohn had written in that self-same gospel which 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY, WJ 

the churches had received. Says Irenaeus in a letter 
to Florinus, his friend and former fellow pupil with 
Polycarp, ** I saw thee in my youth in lower Asia 
with Polycarp , — for I remember the events of those 
times much better than those of recent occurrence ; 
what we learn in fact in our youth, grows with our 
soul, and grows together with it so closely, that I can 
even yet tell the place where the holy Polycarp sat 
when he discoursed, his entrance and exit, the pecu- 
liarities of his mode of life, his bodily figure, the dis- 
courses which he addressed to the people ; how he 
told of his familiar intercourse with John, and with 
the rest who had seen the Lord ; how he narrated their 
discourses, and what he had heard from them in re- 
gard to the Lord about his miracles and doctrine, all 
of which, as Polycarp had received it from those who 
were eye-witnesses of the word of life, he narrated in 
harmony with . the Holy Scriptures ; these things by 
the mercy of God then granted to me, I attentively 
heard and noted down, not on paper, but in my 
heart, and by the grace of God I continually repeat 
it faithfully.'' Irenseus, who brings us thus near to 
the beloved disciple, wrote with considerable ability 
against the Gnostics, and other heretics of his day, 
all of whom he says appealed to the four Gospels 
and acknowledged them as authority. He cites in 
this treatise not less than four hundred passages 
from the Gospels and more than eighty from the 
Gospel of John. Would he not be likely to know the 



Il8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

origin of the book which he quotes as undoubted, 
having been thus brought almost within hearing 
where the contents of the book fell fresh from the 
writer's lips ? 

There was a man whose birth dates about the year 
125, when a great many were yet living who had 
known John and his fellow disciples. He was edu- 
cated in a Christian family. Moreover his family 
was directly connected with John's contemporaries, 
and seven of its members had held the office of 
bishop or presbyter. This man was Polycrates. At 
the date we have assumed, 175, he was fifty years 
old. A few years later, during the last decade of the 
century, he became Bishop of Ephesus, and there on 
the scene of the labor and death of the beloved dis- 
ciple, he dwells complacently upon his memory, and 
refers to the place of his sepulture as well known to 
the Church. He describes himself as " having con- 
ferred with the brethren throughout the world, and 
studied the whole of the sacred Scriptures T There 
with the fourth Gospel in his hand, transmitted in 
the church at Ephesus, where it was read and had 
long been read as the writing of John, having known 
the men who knew the Apostle, — he uses it as the 
unquestioned work of the man whose name it bears. 
In the church over which John himself presided, 
the custodian of the writings he left, and among 
which they were read as Holy Scripture when as- 
sembled for worship ; at a time when his memory 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. II9 

was fresh and vivid ; when there were men yet living 
who had seen and conversed with John's disciples, — 
in this church would John's own successor, who was 
born near to his times, know what he was doing 
when he studied the fourth Gospel as the record 
direct from the hand of the beloved disciple ? ^ 

Follow another line of tradition remote from Ephe- 
sus, but leading up directly to the same source. We 
have named Clement of Alexandria in Egypt. Who 
and what was Clement } If we place ourselves in 
that seat of culture, philosophy, and learning we may 
be able to appreciate his word and testimony. Here 
at Alexandria was a Christian church which dated 
from the times of the Apostles, founded, tradition 
says, by Mark the evangelist, and destined to exert a 
wide and plastic power over the opinions of Christen- 
dom, indeed, to. furnish the moulds in which its 
theology was to be shaped for eighteen centuries. 
Here, too, was a theological school whet*e teachers 
of the keenest insight, of the most affluent learning, 
enlarged both by study and travel, and of the warm- 
est Christian devotion, prepared their scholars for 
their future work. Three of these men come within 
the second century, and, viewed in succession, they 

^ l^hat Polycrates includes the Gospel of John when he says he 
studied ^' the whole of the sacred Scriptures," is the inevitable in- 
ference from the fact that he not only refers to John as authority in 
the controversy about Easter, but refers to John xiii. 25, and xxi. 20, 
where he is described as " he who leaned on the Lord's breast." — 
Eusebius, H. E., L. v. c. 24. 



I20 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

extend nearly through the latter half of it in a con- 
tinuous line of light, brilliant yet mildly beautiful. 
Fifteen years of the life of Origen falls within this 
period. They were years of youth and childhood, 
but such childhood as might well be called the father- 
hood of the man, for they controlled and directed 
the man that was to be. He was born and nurtured 
in a Christian home. Leonides, his father, made the 
boy commit daily portions of Scripture to memory. 
It was no irksome lesson, but the boy's untasked and 
inexpressible delight. The questions he asked were 
beyond his years and beyond the father's scope alto- 
gether, but the father so rejoiced and thanked God 
for this early promise, that he would kiss the boy's 
breast when asleep as the temple where the Holy 
Spirit was preparing to dwell. The fourth Gospel 
became Origen's special study, and the theology of 
the Proem was with him not only the prime moving 
power of Christianity, but it explained and unitized 
the whole system of the universe. As yet, however, 
it had not opened upon him thus grandly, for he says 
that in his youth he only knew the Logos according 
to the flesh. We see him as yet only in his boyhood, 
committing to memory the Christian Scriptures with 
the keenest relish under the guidance of a pious 
father. Who was this Leonides who at the year 185 
had a son born in his family whose mind opened with 
such brilliant promise } He was a man of unusual 
gifts, and of marked intelligence ; probably a rheto- 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 121 

rician, and withal so imbued with the ideas and the 
spirit of the four Gospels which he taught to his chil- 
dren that a few years later he sufifered martyrdom 
for the love of Christ. He had a wife and six other 
children besides Origen. When the father was 
thrown into prison, the boy wrote to him : " See 
thou change not thy mind on our account/' He 
did not change, but cheerfully and .nobly died. His 
property was confiscated, his wife left a helpless 
widow, and his seven children distributed among the 
Christian families of Alexandria as a martyr s legacy. 
What a picture of Christian domestic life in the last 
half of the first century, and of the power of the 
Christian Scriptures as then used in families ! The 
birth and education of this pious Leonides must have 
been some twenty-five years earlier, and they carry 
us up well-nigh towards the middle of the century.^ 

Origen was the pupil of Clement, whom in the last 
decade of the century we find at the head of the the- 
ological school at Alexandria. How much Origen 
owed to his master we do not know ; only it is certain 
that Clement, too, delighted supremely in the fourth 
Gospel, and found in it the central glory of Divine 
revelation. "The Logos" which was in the begin- 
ning with God, "by which all things were made," and 
" which now has taken the name of Christ," is called 
by him a New Song. This Logos is " the Sun of the 
Soul," its informing and indwelling light, the inspirer 

1 Eusebius, H. E., vi. 2. 



122 THE FOURTH. GOSPEL. 

of all the truth to be found in the old philosophies, 
the guide of the Christian not only because it has 
become incarnate, but because its inward shinings 
bring the disciple to behold its glory in the face of 
Jesus Christ. He quotes largely from the other 
Scriptures, but the fourth Gospel with him is the 
heart of Christianity, and his thought, though ex- 
pressed more crudely and irregularly than that of 
Origen, is precisely in the same line of development, 
and shows that the leading idea of the teacher lived 
and glowed in the mind of his pupil. 

Clement not only quotes the same Gospels which 
we possess, but assures us that they were handed 
down to the churches of his day in unbroken line ; 
he gives abridged accounts of all the canonical 
Scriptures, and particularly one pertaining to the 
composition of the four Gospels " received from the 
oldest presbyters." ^ 

It becomes a very interesting question, who in turn 
was the teacher of Clement, and who introduced him 
to this intimate knowledge of Christianity and the 
Christian Scriptures ? Happily, he has told us in 
the language of enthusiastic admiration, and this car- 
ries us back one step further towards the middle of 
the second century. The predecessor of Clement in 
the theological school at Alexandria was Pantaenus, 
who left a name behind him not only distinguished 
for learning, but fragrant with the Christian graces 

1 Eusebius, B. E,y vi. 14 . 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 123 

and virtues. Disciplined in the Greek schools of 
philosophy, but fired with zeal respecting the di- 
vine Word, he preserved "the salutary doctrine as 
given by Peter and James and John and Paul." 
Clement found Pantaenus in great eminence at Alex- 
andria presiding over its theological school. He had 
wandered over the earth hungry for the true doc- 
trine ; he had found teachers from Greece, from It- 
aly, and from Syria, but not till he found Pantaenus 
was his hunger satisfied. " He was in truth," says 
Clement, " a Sicilian bee, who, cropping the flowers 
of the prophetic and apostolic meadow, caused a pure 
knowledge to grow up in the minds of his hearers." 
The prophetic and apostolic meadow, whose flowers 
Pantaenus gathered and charmed his hearers withal, 
was evidently none other than the Old and New Tes- 
taments which he expounded to his pupils ; which 
Clement expounded in turn after him, and which 
Origen in turn expounded after him, and edited in 
his famous " Hexapla," fragments of which have 
come down to us, and which was one of the greatest 
achievements of learning in ancient times. 

But who preceded Pantaenus in this same theologi- 
cal school } We do not know. But we are told by 
Eusebius that it had been established at Alexandria 
from ancient times, and had a reputation for teachers 
" able in eloquence and the study of divine things." ^ 

The " ancient times " of the age of Pantaenus carry 

1 Eusebius, H. E.^ v. 10. 



124 ^-^-^ FOURTH GOSPEL. 

US across the middle of the century and up towards 
its beginning. They bring us near or into the times 
of the beloved disciple himself. 

Skeptical modern criticism has assumed that the 
fourth Gospel was forged by some unknown writer in 
the last half of the second century. We ask our 
readers here to sum up the facts we have given, that 
at or near the time when we are told it was thus 
fabricated, it was universally read as Holy Scripture 
in the churches, dotting the Roman Empire from the 
Euphrates to the Atlantic Ocean, and from the British 
Channel to the African desert ; and last, not least, 
that it was expounded in a theological school which 
could boast of teachers imbued with all the learning 
and philosophy of the times, with minds enriched by 
travel and the study of God's Word ; whose special 
and chosen work was historical investigation ; who 
delighted in John's Gospel as the very heart of Chris- 
tianity and of all divine revelation ; whose succession 
of teachers ran up in continuous line near or into the 
days of the Apostle himself ; who preserved the ac- 
counts of old men who told them how and when it 
was composed ; who gloried so much in its doctrines 
that they declared them in the face of death ; and 
after all this same fourth Gospel was then a new work 
foisted surreptitiously upon the Christian public, re- 
ceived universally and suddenly like a flash of light- 
ning, and without a breath of controversy, while the 
churches that received it, the bishops that read it in 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 125 

the assemblies, the famiUes where the children com- 
mitted it to memory, and the learned theological 
school that expounded it, were all innocent as babes 
of any knowledge respecting its origin ! Such are 
the reasonings of skepticism. It might just as well 
cut the threads of history from behind us every hour, 
and make the world of yesterday and the world of 
to-day disjointed fragments that float at random in 
the river of years ! 

We have followed the converging lines of tradition 
from Lyons in Gaul, from Ephesus in Asia Minor, 
and from Alexandria in Egypt. We might go to 
Carthage in Northern Africa, and cite Tertullian 
with a like result. But let us go east to Jerusalem, 
where a church existed from the beginning, amid 
the scene of the Saviour's life, death, and resurrec- 
tion, and whose first bishop was one of the twelve, — 
the Apostle James. Placing ourselves at the close 
of the second century, what do we find 1 The metro- 
politan churches, especially those founded by Apos- 
tles, very carefully preserved the names in succession 
of their bishops inscribed on tablets and laid up in 
their archives. These were diligently examined by 
Eusebius, and he enumerates in his history the 
names of all the bishops of the Church at Jerusalem, 
from the close of the second century up to the Apos- 
tle James himself. A fact like this goes to show that 
tradition, with these churches, was not so loose and 
floating as is sometimes supposed, especially when it 



126 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

pertained to things held dear and sacred Hke their 
canonical books and consecrated names. Moreover 
Jerusalem was the resort of Christian pilgrims as 
early as the close of the second century ; and yet ear- 
lier it is more than probable, and while disciples were 
yet living who sat at the Apostles' feet and heard their 
story. Thither they went to see with their own eyes 
the places trodden by the Redeemer s feet, and to gain 
knowledge of the localities referred to in the New 
Testament, that they might read it with better under- 
standing.^ It is easy to conceive with what avidity 
a teacher who expounded the New Testament would 
seek the geography of Palestine, and read it as a liv- 
ing book. Thither went Clement of Alexandria ; 
and we find him there just after the close of the 
second century. Whom did he meet at Jerusalem t 
He met Alexander, bishop of the church there, be- 
tween 193 and 211, who has told us of Clement's 
visit in episcopal letters, fragments of which Euse- 
bius has preserved. In one of these letters Alexan- 
der speaks of Clement as " the blessed presbyter, a 
man endued with all virtue and well approved, who 
coming hither by the providence and superinten- 
dence of the Lord, has confirmed and increased the 
Church of God." 2 

But there was another man whom Clement met 
also at Jerusalem. Alexander was not sole bishop, 

1 Neander's Church History, Torrey's edition, vol. i. p. 691. 
2^. ^., vi. II. 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY, 12/ 

but colleague with the venerable patriarch, Narcis- 
sus, who had held the Episcopate of Jerusalem for 
about twenty years. His name breathed the odors 
of piety down even to the times of Eusebius. He 
lived to an extreme age. Alexander says in one 
of his episcopal letters, " Narcissus salutes you, the 
same who was bishop here before me, and is now 
colleague with me in prayers, being now advanced to 
his hundred and tenth year, and who with me exhorts 
you to be of one mind.''^ This was in 211. Here 
was a man whose life spanned almost the whole of 
the second century ; whose scene of active labor and 
care was the very place where Jesus taught, died, 
and rose again ; who must have been familiar with 
many who had seen and heard the Apostles ; who 
lived when the fourth Gospel was read in his church 
and in all Christendom, as holy Scripture, and who 
began to live when the man whose name the fourth 
Gospel bears went to his earthly rest. His life fills 
up the whole space between John and Clement, with 
not more than the gap of a single year, and probably 
not even that. He must have known familiarly 
scores of persons who knew John before he left 
Jerusalem for his charge at Ephesus. This man, 
Clement communed with at Jerusalem. We can un- 
derstand how much his language signifies when he 
gives us traditions about the four Gospels " received 
from aged presbyters!' The assumption that John's 

1 H. E., vi. II. 



128 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

Gospel first saw the light after the year 150, or during 
the second century even, becomes, if possible, still 
more absurd. 

We ascend the stream. We come into the third 
quarter of the second century. We can hardly say 
that the historical evidence grows stronger as we 
ascend, which were scarcely possible, but it thickens 
and becomes multiform. 

And here at the opening of this quarter we meet 
with a professed canon of Scripture carefully ar- 
ranged. We find a list of canonical books dating 
from about 170, discovered by Muratori, and proba- 
bly written at Rome, and in this list, Matthew, Mark, 
Luke, and John, stand in the order as we have them 
now, and as they had then been universally adopted. 

The four Gospels were originally composed and 
published in the Greek language ; that of Matthew 
being possibly, though not certainly, an exception. 
It was the vernacular speech of many provinces of 
the Roman Empire. It had been diffused through- 
out the East by the conquests of Alexander. The 
Old Testament had tong been popularly used in a 
Greek version. Greek was the language of scholars ; 
it was to a large extent the language of commerce, 
and it was preeminently adapted to clothe the ideas of 
the New Testament and depict the doctrines of Chris;- 
tianity in their minutest and most delicate shadings. 

But Christianity soon transcended the bounds of 
Greek culture, and it became necessary that the New 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 129 

Testament should be rendered into other tongues. 
Of course it would be translated very early into the 
language of Rome, which was spoken throughout the 
West. It would be translated into Syriac, which was 
spoken in the East. Accordingly we have a Syriac 
version called the Pesckito, generally acknowledged 
on good evidence to have been made before the close 
of the second century ; and we have a Latin version 
well known under the Itala, made still earlier ; for 
Tertullian used it, as is known by his quotations, and 
the Latin translator of Irenaeus' great work against 
heresies also followed it. These translations both 
contain the four Gospels substantially as they have 
come down to us. Here then is the important fact. 
The four Gospels before the close of the century, 
were held as preeminent authority, and translated 
into other tongues to be quoted and used as such in 
other communities. But suppose we had the very 
Greek text from which these translations were made, 
we should then be carried back still farther towards 
the beginning. Well, that very text has lately been 
found. We have in the lately discovered " Codex 
Siniaticus," the identical Greek text out of which 
those translations must have been made, for the 
" various readings " of the latter are found in the 
former, and correspond thereto. This carries us back 
inevitably to the year 150, and shows that a Canon 
of Scripture was then firmly established. All the 
theories recently blown up, assuming the later origin 
of the fourth Gospel, vanish like bubbles that break 
9 



I30 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

in air. We shall see by and by that we are carried 
back by these ancient documents, not only to the 
middle of the century, but past it, and up to its very 
beginning. 

Not only translations, but harmonies of the four Gos- 
pels were made during this period, in which the fourth 
Gospel was included, and this forms an independent 
and most conclusive ground of evidence. The city 
of Antioch, the capital of Syria, received Chris- 
tianity from the hands of the Apostles themselves. 
Here in the year i68, we find Theophilus, bishop of 
the church in that city. Only five pastorates had 
preceded him in that church, since the times of Paul 
and Barnabas, who started from Antioch on their 
missionary journey. It was in the vicinity of Jeru- 
salem and in frequent communication with it, and its 
bishop must have known familiarly many who saw 
and heard the personal disciples of Jesus. Theophi- 
lus wrote several works, which were extant in the 
times of Eusebius, who describes them. In one of 
these he names John's Gospel as a part of the Holy 
Scriptures, and John himself as a writer guided by 
the Holy Spirit. But more than this, Theophilus 
wrote a commentary on the Gospels, including John, 
showing not only the estimation in which he held 
them himself, but in which they were held by the 
churches themselves. His testimony is that of the 
Christian communities separated by only a single 
generation from those who had consorted with the 
Apostles, and received the Gospel from their lips. 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY, 131 

Contemporary with Theophilus was Tatian, who 
flourished as early as 150, a disciple of Justin Martyr, 
one therefore, who learned Christianity of a teacher 
whose life began in the first century, and was ten 
years a contemporary with John. Tatian relapsed 
into Gnosticism, but he wrote an exegetical harmony 
of the four Gospels, including the book of John, 
which he quotes, and which also was extant in the 
times of Eusebius. His testimony also is that of 
his times, showing incontestably that in the middle 
of the second century the four Gospels belonged to 
the Canon of Scripture^ so universally received in the 
churches that they were translated and expounded 
even as now, as the rule of faith and of life. How 
long must they have existed to have acquired, by the 
year 150, this universal and undisputed authority in 
the churches, East and West, in at least three lan- 
guages, from the Euphrates to the Rhone, and from 
the English Channel to the deserts of Africa ? That 
commentaries were written upon the four Gospels, 
and harmonies made of them, and that they were 
bound together as a separate and exclusive whole, is 
a fact of weightier significance even than individual 
citations. " These enterprises," says Tischendorf, 
"fall soon after the middle of the second century, 
and consequently we must assume that the use and 
acknowledgment of all four Evangelists, in a far 
earlier period, is fully determined." ^ 

1 Wenn wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst? pp. II, 12. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 

OTILL we ascend the stream. We come into the 
^^ first half of the second century and among a 
generation, many of whom were contemporaries of 
the Apostles or of their companions, and co-labor- 
ers. Here we find the historical evidence coursing 
through various channels, yet converging to its single 
source. 

I. The first class of men whom we meet here are 
those Christian fathers in full reception of the faith 
of the Church, whose vigorous manhood falls within 
the second century, but who were born before the 
close of the first, and whose childhood therefore was 
contemporary with the later Apostles and their com- 
panions. Some of them had seen the last of the 
Apostles and hung upon his speech. All of them 
belonged to a period when tradition was fresh, fre- 
quent, and direct ; when the minds of new converts 
were eager and inquisitive, and when the times of 
Christ, and the scene through which He moved, must 
have been produced in their minds with most vivid 
and uncoloring sunlight. 

First, we P^eet with Justin Martyr, the teacher of 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 133 

Tatian. Justin was born not far from a. d. 100. He 
was a native of Shechem, in Samaria, the Sychar of 
the New Testament. He was not born, however, in 
a Christian family, and knew nothing of Christianity 
till his early manhood. Then in his hunger for di- 
vine knowledge, he met a serene old man, of aspect 
grave and meek, who directed him to Jesus Christ 
and the Hebrew prophets. He had witnessed the 
tranquillity of the martyrs and their triumph over 
torture and death. He became a convert to Chris- 
tianity. How genuine his conversion was is shown 
by the fact that he publicly defended it in his Apolo- 
gies, when he clearly foresaw that the defense would 
cost him his life. 

His pupil Tatian called him " a most wonderful 
man." Judged by the standard of his own times, his 
acquirements were remarkable, and by the standard 
of any times his moral greatness and Christian hero- 
ism are worthy of warm admiration. He is an im- 
portant and most unexceptionable witness to the four 
Gospels, not only as to how they were regarded by 
himself, but how they were received and held in all 
the churches of his day. He gives us an interesting 
and somewhat graphical view of these churches as- 
sembled for worship : " On the day which is called 
Sunday we all, whether dwelling in the cities or in 
the country, assemble together, when the memoirs by 
the Apostles, or the writings of the prophets, are read 
as long as time permits." Again, he characterizes 



134 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

these memoirs as written by " the Apostles and their 
companions," thus clearly designating the synoptics 
and the fom'th Gospel. He quotes them so much 
and so familiarly as to show that his mind was im- 
bued with their spirit, and that their language flowed 
spontaneously from his pen ; and the main facts 
could be reproduced, says Mr. Norton, from Justin's 
writings alone, and the passages referred to the places 
from which they were severally drawn. But the evi- 
dence in respect to the fourth Gospel is very striking 
and doubly significant. Justin delighted in the Jo- 
hannean theology. It colored his whole mind, and 
thence flowed into his speech. " The making over 
of the Logos to Christ," says Tischendorf, *' is a de- 
duction from John in many passages of Justin, of 
which no trace in the synoptics nor in the oldest par- 
allel writings ever occurs to us. So, too, the answer 
of the Baptist to the inquiring messengers of the 
Jews is given by Justin word for word as only John 
reports it ; as also he gives the very searching pas- 
sage respecting the second birth," found only in John 
iii. 3. These citations compel those who deny the 
genuineness of the fourth Gospel, to take refuge in 
the theory of a lost writing which contained a passage 
as it stands in John. This is the desperate shift 
of the skeptical criticism. To measure its enormous 
absurdity requires but a moment's reflection. Jus- 
tin's first Apology was published a. d. 138, in which 
he says the Gospels are read in the churches in city 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 135 

and country with the prophets ; read, that is, as Holy 
Scripture. These were the Gospels as he quoted 
them, — memoirs of Christ written by Apostles and 
their companions, including, therefore, the book of 
John as he _knew it. Twelve years later, as we have 
seen, the four Gospels, as we have them^ were read in 
all the churches east and west, in Syria, in Rome, and 
in Africa, and one of yustins own pupils had made 
a harmony of them which was extant in the times 
of Eusebius. These critics then would have us 
believe that within this interval of twelve years, one 
book of John dropped out of use all over Christen- 
dom, covering now its thousands of square miles, and 
including its peoples of various tongues ; and a new 
and spurious book of John in at least three lan- 
guages, went into its place, simultaneously and uni- 
versally, and with the silence of night, as not a lisp 
of controversy was ever heard about it. This, too, 
during the lifetime of Justin, — for he lived and 
wrote past the middle of the century, and when 
men were giving up their lives for the ideas which 
these books embodied as the Rule of Faith. It has 
been said that the science of historical criticism was 
not understood by these people. We shall see. But 
granting they had not the keenness of critics they 
certainly were not fools. 

We come next to a very important witness, who is 
always named as " the blessed Polycarp." We have 
already referred to him in connection with Irenaeus 



136 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

his pupil, but he is too important a witness, not to be 
evoked in his own name. He not only lived through 
his youth and younger manhood in intimate and 
loving intercourse with John, and other Apostles and 
disciples who had seen and heard the Lord Jesus, 
but he was installed as bishop over one of the con- 
stellated churches — the church at Smyrna, near 
Ephesus — by apostoHc hands. The mantle of the 
beloved disciple fell gracefully upon him. The sweet- 
ness and benignity of spirit largely imbreathed on 
the bosom of Jesus, exhaled in its benignity and 
gentleness around "the blessed Polycarp." The 
same influence inspired him with the intrepidity 
of Christian heroism. It will be readily under- 
stood how by his intercourse with John, not merely 
the contents of the fourth Gospel, but also some 
of " the many other things " which Jesus did and 
said, and which "are not written in this book," 
entered largely into the memory and the very being 
of Polycarp, and that he would preach Christ to his 
flock, not so much from written documents as from 
this living gospel in his soul. This indeed was the 
case. It is plain, from the account of Irenaeus who 
heard him, that this was the burden of his discourse 
and conversation with the people whom he drew 
around him ; and so vividly did he reproduce to them 
the life and teachings of Jesus, "his miracles and 
doctrine," as he had " received them from the eye- 
witnesses," that the picture of the man, and the room 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY, 137 

where they met, Hved afterward in the memory with 
unwonted brightness, — " the place where he sat, his 
bodily form, his entrances and walks, and the com- 
plexion of his life." Long afterwards Polycarp was 
quoted as a kind of living Bible, to show what Jesus 
would have said and taught. Irenaeus cites him in 
his controversy with the Gnostics as " a man who had 
been instructed by the Apostles, and had familiar 
intercourse with many who had seen Christ, and had 
also been appointed bishop by the Apostles in Asia, 
in the church at Smyrna ; whom we also have seen 
in our youth, for he lived a long time and to a very 
advanced age, when after a glorious and most dis- 
tinguished martyrdom he departed this life. He al- 
ways taught what he had learned from the Apostles, 
what the church had handed down, and what is the 
only true doctrine. All the churches bear witness to 
these things, and those that have been successors to 
Polycarp to the present time, a witness of the truth 
much more worthy of credit, and much more certain 
than either Valentine or Marcion, or the rest of those 
perverse teachers." ^ 

Polycarp suffered martyrdom at Smyrna a. d. 167, 
being then eighty-six years old, as already stated. 
We have a full and detailed description of his suffer- 
ings in a letter from his church at Smyrna to the 
churches in Pontus, and which Eusebius mostly pre- 
serves. It is written by eye-witnesses, and describes 

1 Eusebius, H, E.y iv. 14. 



138 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

the heavenly bearing of the venerable martyr, " filled 
with confidence and joy, and his countenance bright- 
ened with grace." ^ 

A single writing of Polycarp has come down to 
us, — his letter to the church at Philippi. It is writ- 
ten with unction and dignity, and is worthy of its 
author's fame. It affords evidence moreover the 
most full and pointed, that when it was written there 
was a canon of Scripture corresponding to our own, 
well known and established in the churches. He 
quotes the New Testament again and again. He 
quotes Paul's Epistles by name, and quotes them as 
canonical. " Do we not know, he says, that ' the 
saints shall judge the world ' as Paul teaches 1 " 
Again, " I trust ye are well versed in the Sacred 
Scriptures, and that nothing is hid from you. It is 
declared in these Scriptures, ^ Be ye angry and sin not,' 
and ' Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.' " 
But what is directly and forcibly to our purpose, he 
quotes the first epistle of John expressly to refute the 
Gnostics, showing not only that it was then in the 
canon, but also how John himself understood and ap- 
plied it. Referring to those "false brethren," who 
" in hypocrisy bear the name of the Lord and draw 
away vain men into error," he says, " Whosoever 
does not confess that Jesus Christ is come in the 
flesh is antichrist (i John iv. 3) ; and whosoever does 

1 It was evidently interpolated by later hands, but its main facts 
are regarded as authentic. 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 139 

not confess the testimony of the cross is of the 
devil, and whosoever perverts the oracles of the 
Lord to his own lusts, and says that there is neither 
a resurrection nor a judgment, is the first-born of 
Satan." Every sentence here sharply distinguishes 
the Gnostic heresy. The disciple of John quotes him 
to rebuke this haunting and hated error. That the 
same hand wrote the Catholic Epistle, and the fourth 
Gospel, is to our minds an undoubting conviction, and 
proof for the genuineness of one is good for both. 

But Poly carp nowhere quotes the fourth Gospel, 
and for obvious reasons. His intercourse with John 
took place before the fourth Gospel was written, and 
before that time he was not only possessed with its 
contents, but the life of Jesus, in ampler scope and 
more minute detail, filled his memory and glowed in 
his mind and heart. It is well known that the re- 
cital of the events in the life of Christ made up the 
substance of the preaching of some of the Apostles, 
and we can well understand with what hunger it 
would be received, and how fondly it would be treas- 
ured up. 

But Polycarp is a witness to the fourth Gospel, in 
a way far more complete and satisfactory than a few 
quotations could possibly be. Irenaeus not only 
quotes it, but he quotes it as Holy Scripture ; and we 
know both from him and his translator, that the same 
work which has come down to us, was the one which 
he had in his hands. But Irenaeus sat at Polycarp's 



I40 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

feet in Smyrna, heard him recount the narrative and 
conversation of John and of others who had seen the 
Lord, the " discourses " of Jesus, " his miracles and 
doctrine." These, he says, were ''in consistency 
with the Holy Scriptures " ; that is, with the fourth 
Gospel which he held in his hand, and which we have 
now. The fourth Gospel becomes not merely the 
testimony of John. It is as if a whole company of 
eye-witnesses rose up from amidst the constellated 
churches over which he presided, saying over again 
the closing adjuration of John's Gospel, "this is the 
disciple that ' testifieth of these things and wrote 
these things, and we know that his testimony is 
true.'' 

The next witness is Papias, who was Bishop of 
Hierapolis in Syria, about the year ii6. He was a 
weak, but pious and learned man. He wrote a work 
in five books called '' Interpretations of our Lord's 
Declarations," which Irenaeus had seen, but of which 
Eusebius evidently had only seen the preface. In 
the fourth book, as Irenaeus read it, Papias says he 
was an associate of Poly carp and a hearer of John. 
In the " preface," as Eusebius quotes it, Papias repre- 
sents himself as an eager and inquisitive hearer of 
old men who knew the Apostles, and reported large- 
ly the discourses of Jesus. The " Interpretations " 
were evidently expositions of these traditional say- 
ings. He not only knew the Gospels of Matthew and 
Mark, but tells us how and why they were composed, 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 14I 

and he assures us that he had this account of them 
from John the presbyter, who was a hearer of John 
the Evangelist and other Apostles. Whenever he 
met with any of these old men who had sat at the 
Apostles' feet, he made it a point, he says, to inquire 
" what was said by Andrew, Peter, or Philip ; what by 
Thomas, James, John, Matthew, or any other of the 
disciples of the Lord, for I do not think I derived so 
much benefit from books as from the living voice of 
those that are still surviving!' He does not quote 
the Gospels, and he does not mention the book of 
John. Nothing seems more perfectly natural. Let 
us place ourselves in his position with all the fresh 
awakened interest in the wonderful events which had 
taken place, and which were still shaking the fabric 
of society. The men were yet alive who had con- 
versed with the twelve that gathered about Jesus in 
Palestine ; old men like Polycarp and John the Pres- 
byter, whose memories brooded tenaciously over what 
they had heard, and whose souls were ripening for 
immortality under its hallowing sway. How eagerly 
and fondly should we have turned from the synopsis 
of books to the conversation of those living men ! 
How inquisitive should we be about all the gossipy 
details of circumstance ; how Jesus looked and how 
he dressed ; what were all his private haunts ; what 
other things he said and did ; what were the shin- 
ings of his face and what the tones of his voice ! 
This is precisely what Papias evidently did ; and he 



142 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

says naively, " I do not think I derived so much ben- 
efit from books." He may have referred to the fourth 
Gospel in the body of his work, for we have only 
short quotations from its preface. For quite obvious 
reasons, however, he would not be likely to do so. It 
was then fresh and recent, and in the hands of those 
that knew all about it and knew John himself Not 
so of Matthew and Mark. Their books were already 
sixty years old, and had become ancient documents, 
and the way Papias speaks of them, shows not only 
that they were well known, but that an interest at- 
tached to them as sacred writings, and that how and 
why they were composed were questions of exceed- 
ing interest. " John the presbyter, said this. Mark 
being the interpreter of Peter, whatsoever he re- 
corded he wrote with great accuracy, not in the 
order, however, in which it was spoken and done by 
our Lord." Again, " Matthew composed his history 
in the Hebrew dialect, and every one translated it as 
he could." He speaks of these precisely as of writ- 
ings which had become venerable and canonical. 
But his testimony for Matthew and Mark is good for 
that of John also. How preposterous the supposition 
that the churches which held in their hands the very 
writings of the Evangelists, and could prove them as 
such by living men, and the very details of their com- 
position, would throw them away and receive in their 
place forged or second-hand documents ; or that a 
spurious Gospel of John could have been got up and 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 1 43 

foisted upon the churches while the persons could be 
appealed to who sat at his feet ! Schenkel fixes the 
date of the fourth Gospel in the times of Papias, 
about the year 120 : that is, it was got up by some 
forger, while hundreds were alive who had seen John 
and drank his discourse ; while the writings which 
came from an apostle's hand were matters of keen in- 
terest and inquiry ; while John's own church at Ephe- 
sus held the legacy of his spoken and written words 
as sacred treasures, remembered the tones of his 
voice, and pointed pilgrims to the sepulchre where 
he slept. 

The next witness to the canon of Scripture is the 
author of the " Letter of Barnabas," probably the 
same Barnabas who was the companion of Paul, 
though this is not entirely certain, and is not essen- 
tial to the present argument. The history of this let- 
ter is curious. It was quoted as early as the last 
decade of the second century by Clement, and quoted 
as genuine as we would quote one of Paul's Epistles. 
It was quoted afterwards by Origen, and as the work 
of Barnabas. It disappeared, and was wholly un- 
known in modern times till about 1645, when it was 
discovered, and an edition published at Paris. It was 
variously regarded. Some thought it genuine, some 
not. Rosenmliller received it. Mr. Norton rejected 
it. But thus far in modern times it was only known 
in a mutilated copy, partly in the Greek original, and 
partly in an old Latin translation, and a very bad 



144 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

one, the beginning of the former and the end of the 
latter being lost, and the text of both being cor- 
rupt. Its antiquity, however, was indisputable, and 
it quoted Matthew*s Gospel as Holy Scripture, under 
the formula ^^ as it is written^' under which only can- 
onical Scripture was ever cited. Here was a hard 
fact to be disposed of somehow, or we must admit 
that early in the second century there was a New 
Testament canon of Scripture. It was evaded in this 
way. The quotation occurs in the Latin translation, 
and is a gloss. It could not have been in the Greek 
original. "The quotation-form ^ as it is written^ 
said Credner, " used for the New Testament books, 
is for that time unheard of, and without example. 
On internal grounds we must question the correct- 
ness of the text till the contrary is proved to us." 

The contrary is now proved. In the " Codex Sini- 
aticus " we have the oldest Greek manuscript which 
the world possesses. It has just been discovered, 
and lo ! the Epistle of Barnabas reappears entire, 
not in a mutilated copy, but the whole Greek origi- 
nal. That the work cannot possibly date later than 
the year loo, the contents, says Tischendorf, unex- 
ceptionably show. Others carry the date back as far 
as the year 80. Turning to the disputed formula, 
there it is in the old Greek parchment manuscript 
''as it is written," and the smell of gloss all dis- 
appears. Tischendorf does not conceal his delight 
and exultation. " Surely the fact that at the opening 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 1 45 

of the second century, proof that the existence of an 
evangelical canon has been found, is a crushing 
weight against the boundless play of hypothesis in 
which during the last ten years the histo;'y of the 
New Testament canon has been involved." ^ 

Finally, the authors of the Appendix to John's Gos- 
pel, furnish, we think, a;n indisputable proof of its gen- 
uineness. The critical reader sees at once that the 
concluding part was written by another hand. By a 
still more careful criticism he sees that John's Gospel 
proper ends with the twentieth chapter, where the 
writer thus closes and sums up the whole, " And 
many other miracles truly did Jesus perform in the 
presence of his disciples which are not written in 
this book. But these are written that ye might know 
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that 
believing ye might have life through his name." 
Then follows the twenty-first chapter, beginning as a 
separate piece, not at all continuous with what goes 
before, having throughout the air of tradition, in a 
different style, and closing with two passages written 
professedly by another person with idioms and turns 
of expression which John never uses. It refers to a 
rumor which had become quite current, that Jesus 
had told John that he should not die but should sur- 

1 Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst .? p. 45. It is very doubt- 
ful whether Barnabas, "the companion of Paul," wrote this epistle. 
It contains many silly things, as it needs must, in attempting to alle- 
gorize the Old Testament. 
10 



146 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

vive the rest of the disciples till his second coming. 
It is perfectly plain, from the writings of Paul and 
Peter, that the expectation was quite general of 
Christ's second personal coming ; and that the time 
was so near that some of the Apostles would live to 
see it,^ and so would be translated without seeing 
death. " We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be 
changed." They seem to have construed the lan- 
guage of Jesus to John as a direct promise that this 
would be so. It is easy to see that John dying and 
no Christ appearing, the word of Jesus would seem 
to be compromised. From this as from other tokens, 
we think the evidence conclusive that the last chap- 
ter is an appendix written after John's death. It 
undertakes to show that Jesus did not give any such 
promise, and deeming it important to make known 
just what he did say, it repeats his exact language, 
and repeats it twice over : '' Then that report went 
abroad among the brethren, that that disciple was 
not to die ; yet Jesus said not unto him that he would 
not die, but If it be my will that he remain till I 
come, what does it concern thee } " Then follow these 
words : " The person (to whom this rumor referred) 
is the disciple who wrote these things and testifieth 
of these things, and we know that his testimony is 
true." No one ever speaks of himself in this way. 
Then follows the extravagant statement of the clos- 
ing passage, as remote as possible from the simplicity 
of John's narrative, and containing Greek idioms 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY, 1 47 

which he never uses. "And there are also many 
other things which Jesus did, which, if they should 
be written in detail, I suppose that even the world 
itself could not contain the books that would be 
written.'* 

We have seen how eagerly and fondly the first 
hearers of the Apostles hung upon their speech, and 
how they would ask for the details in the life of Jesus. 
That this was so at Ephesus, Polycarp and Papias 
are unexceptionable witnesses as cited by Irenaeus. 
Their reports coming only at second hand, we 
should receive with much interest, but we should 
not expect to see things through their eyes in the 
severe uncoloring daylight as seen through the eye- 
witnesses themselves. Things would appear very 
much as in the closing chapter of the fourth Gospel, 
and their excited wonder and admiration might well 
dictate the closing passage. 

But this appendix becomes a most important and 
independent testimony to John's record itself. It is 
wanting in none of the manuscripts, and it becomes 
extremely probable that it went forth in the first 
copies from the Church of Ephesus or the constel- 
lated churches over which he presided, as their testi- 
mony both to the known authorship of the fourth 
Gospel and to the truth of its contents which they 
had heard from the writer s lips. We know from 
other sources that while the hearers of John were 
yet alive, that is, in the first decades of the second 



148 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

century, the fourth Gospel with its appendix were in 
the canon of the New Testament, and it becomes 
almost certain, therefore, that no copies were in cir- 
culation without it. The solemn averment, " This is 
the disciple who testifieth of these things and wrote 
these things, and we hiow that his testimony is true," 
becomes that of the Church at Ephesus which had 
heard year after year the details of the life of Jesus 
from his lips ; which had received the legacy of his 
written narrative, indorsed it as genuine, and sent it 
forth to the Christian world.^ 

II. The enemies of Christianity, during the period 
under review, furnish the same conclusive argument 
for the fourth Gospel. Conspicuous among these is 
Celsus, its bitter antagonist, who wrote about the 
year 150 to refute it. Origen answered him, and has 
preserved some things which he wrote. Celsus refers 
to scandalous reports and traditions ; says he could 
bring forward many things which have been truly 
written about Jesus of a very different character from 
the writings of his own disciples. These, however, 
he says he will forego, and proceeds to make use of 
the four evangelists as the public and sole authority 
acknowledged by the Church. He refers to all the 
four Gospels, and quotes them ; tries to show their 
inconsistency with each other, dwells upon the dis- 

1 Norton considers the last chapter of the fourth Gospel as John's 
writing, except the last two verses. Neander ascribes the whole to 
another hand. Both consider the whole chapter an appendix. 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY, 1 49 

crepancy between Luke and John, and Matthew and 
Mark, touching the appearance of the angels at the 
sepulchre ; quotes the synoptics repeatedly, and John 
several times ; seizes upon John's designation of 
Jesus as " the Logos ; " ridicules the idea that blood 
and water flowed from his side at the crucifixion, — 
a fact found only in John's narrative. "All these 
things," he says, " we have taken out of your own 
Scriptures, we need no other witness, for you fall 
upon your own sword." ^ 

There were two classes of Gnostics : there were 
those who broke with the Church and rejected its 
Scriptures, and there were those who kept within it 
and perverted them. Of the former class was Mar- 
cion. . He flourished between the years 140 and 150. 
He was the son of the Bishop of Sinope in lesser 
Asia, was educated in the Christian faith, but fell 
away from it, and was excommunicated. He rejected 
the Old Testament as being only the work of the 
Demiurgus ; he rejected John's Gospel, and probably 
Matthew and Mark, not because he disputed their 
authorship, but because he held the Apostles them- 
selves to be corrupters of the true faith. He retained 
Luke's Gospel, which he undertook to alter and ex- 
purgate, to make it conform to his views. That he 
was acquainted with John's Gospel is abundantly 
clear, and has been vainly denied. Tertullian, who 
writes to refute him, says, " Marcion having got the 

1 See Tischendorf 's tract, pp. 27, 28. 



150 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

Epistle of Paul to the Galatians, who blames the 
Apostles themselves as not walking uprightly accord- 
ing to the truth of the Gospel, and also charges some 
false apostles with perverting the Gospel of Christ, 
sets himself to weaken the credit of those Gospels 
which are truly such, and are published under the 
7tame of Apostles or apostolic menr ^ The fourth 
Gospel is here clearly referred to, and afterwards by 
name ; and Tertullian states the reason why Marcion 
rejected it. " The Gospel of John would convict him 
of error." This shows, beyond any reasonable ques- 
tion, that in the year 140 the four Gospels, and John's 
especially, were universally ascribed by the Church, 
and its enemies as well, to the men whose names 
they bear, and that the former held them as sacred 
and canonical authority.^ 

III. We come next to a very interesting and im- 
portant mine of evidence which has lately been 
explored by a highly competent and skillful hand. 
Every one knows how exceedingly concise are our 
canonical Gospels ; how rigidly they hold the reader 
to the prominent facts pertaining to the life and 
public ministry of Jesus ; how little they gratify mere 
curiosity, and how free they are from gossiping 
details. Their majestic simplicity is strong evidence 
under the circumstances of a controlling and shaping 
Providence, for these are very different productions 

1 Ad Ma7'cion, lib. iv. c. 3. 

2 £)^ Came Christi, c. 3. 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 151 

from those which would naturally have been dictated 
by the private taste and judgment of their authors. 
But herein was a most tempting opportunity offered 
to pious fraud to try its hand in filling up the sup- 
posed gaps in the narratives. This was attempted 
very early, and hence arises a New Testament apoc- 
ryphal litei^atitre ; forgeries got up by pretended 
friends of Christianity which they tried to circulate 
under apostolic or highly honored names. Tischen- 
dorf, the prince of scholars in the history and puri- 
fication of the true text, has made this apocryphal 
literature the study of years, and they furnish, he 
says, the completest proof for the earliest reception 
of our evangelical canon. This holds especially true 
of two writings : the '' Gospel of James " and the 
'' Acts of Pilate." 

The spurious " Gospel of James " stands in such 
relation to our Gospels, which it tries to supplement, 
that the latter must have been a long time in circu- 
lation before the forgery was attempted. There are 
passages in the writings of Justin Martyr, whose 
first "Apology" dates as early as 138, which can only 
be traced to the " Gospel of James," and which show 
clearly that the work was in his hands. This being 
so, it must have been written in the first decades of 
the second century, and therefore Matthew and Luke, 
which it tries to supplement in matters pertaining to 
the birth and parentage of Jesus, must fall, beyond 
question, within the first. 



152 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

The " Acts of Pilate " refer not only to the synop- 
tics, but to John's Gospel. For this also our oldest 
witness is Justin. In his first " Apology " he refers 
to various things foretold concerning the crucifixion, 
and of Christ's miraculous healing. He gives an 
account of the trial, death, and resurrection of Christ, 
and adds, "All this has Pilate, driven by his con- 
science to become a Christian, reported of Christ to 
the emperor Tiberius." We have the same in Ter- 
tuUian given in more detail. 

A writing answering entirely to these ancient cita- 
tions, and bearing the same title, has come down to 
our time in many old Greek and Latin manuscripts 
which Tischendorf identifies as the very work quoted 
by Justin and Tertullian. The work presupposes the 
records of our first three Gospels, and that of John 
beyond all question ; for while the report of the cru- 
cifixion and the resurrection refer to the former, that 
of the trial of Christ is essentially the report of the 
latter. An apocryphal book then was in existence 
in the year 138, based on the synoptics and the book 
of John. It must have been written some time be- 
fore to have obtained credit with such a man as Jus- 
tin. It carries us up towards the beginning of the 
second century, and therefore the Gospels on which 
it was based must have originated in the first. " It 
falls," says Tischendorf, " not as the lightning flash- 
ing through impervious darkness, but it is one of the 
clearest among many rays of light out of the post- 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY, 1 53 

apostolic age streaming down to us over the weight- 
iest question of Christendom." ^ 

But in quite another way these apocryphal gospels 
furnish evidence of the true ones. The true ones in 
their more than Doric simplicity and divine pathos, 
in moral dignity and ethical tone, and in their direct 
appeal to the inmost consciousness of human nature, 
stand forth in contrast with the spurious ones even 
as God's work in nature stands in contrast with the 
contrivances of men. This is not a matter of indi- 
vidual taste and judgment. Individuals, as Tertul- 
lian and Justin, were deceived. The churches were 
not, and in no case can it be shown that a forged 
Gospel was foisted into the canon of Scripture to be 
generally received. The same spirit that breathed 
through the letter of the Word breathed also through 
the heart of the Church, and made its faculty of 
recognition in the main unerring and its vision 
clear. The apocryphal Gospels show us indubitably 
what our New Testament writings would have been 
if they had been the productions of the second cen- 
tury. All that gave the spurious ones local and tem- 
porary currency was the grains of gold filched from 
the evangelic narratives to incorporate with their 
tinsel and sand. An epistle, if very brief, might pos- 
sibly escape detection. But when forgers undertook 
to write gospels, though they borrowed from the true 
ones, their own despicable puerilities showed more 

1 Wenn wurden unsere Evangelien verfassty pp. 29-40. 



154 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

surely in the contrast. They tried the experiment 
repeatedly. They invented their " Lives of Christ," 
and these compare with the simple, sublime concep- 
tions of our Gospels, and especially the fourth, as the 
murky bonfires of midnight compare with the stars 
that shine in eternal serenity and beauty above them. 
IV. The heretics of the Church are a company of 
important and independent witnesses. There was a 
class of Gnostics, as already intimated, who did not 
take their position outside the Christian Church and 
assail it, but claimed their position within it. They 
might the more easily have maintained it after the 
death of the Apostles if there had been no Canon of 
Scripture by which their notions were to be judged, 
but only loose and floating traditions. But if there 
was such a canon of Scripture, of course their first 
object would be to pervert it and bend it to their 
purpose. We know just what they did since Irenaeus 
wrote to refute them ; and Hippolytus who wrote 
towards the beginning of the third century has 
given an account of their opinions, and how they de- 
fended them, and the works of both these fathers are 
in our hands^ Irenaeus says, "So firmly are our 
Gospels established that the heretics themselves bear 
witness unto them, and appeal to them to confirm 
their own doctrine." These heretics belonged to the 
first half of the second century. Irenaeus wrote 
about twenty years after their time. His words give 
the pronounced judgment of the second half of the 



WITNESSES OE THE SECOND CENTURY. 1 55 

second century on the first half; and more than this, 
we have detailed accounts of the writings of these 
heretics which confirm the judgment. 

Among these heretics Valentine stands conspicu- 
ous. He came from Egypt to Rome before the year 
140, and passed some twenty years in that city. 
Throughout his whole system he borrows his ter- 
minology from the fourth Gospel. Irenaeus expressly 
asserts that the sect used this Gospel to the fullest 
extent, and grounded their doctrines upon the proem. 
The Word, the Only Begotten, Life, Light, Fullness, 
Truth, Grace, were the train of hypostatized ^ons 
which, with God, made up the famous octave of Val- 
entine.. That the author of the fourth Gospel bor- 
rowed from Valentine is fantastically absurd. That 
Gnosticism should try to get the fourth Gospel out of 
its way by taking it up into its omnivorous recepta- 
cle and translating it, somewhat as the ass translated 
Bottom the weaver, comports with its whole genius 
and history. 

Hippolytus confirms Irenaeus. He gives several 
instances where Valentine had quoted John's Gospel, 
always perverting it and trying to dovetail it into his 
own system. 

The disciples of Valentine followed up the work. 
Ptolemaeus was one of them who quotes Matthew sev- 
eral times, and once the fourth Gospel, naming it as 
the work of ^an apostle. " The apostle says, that all 
things were made by Him, — the Word, — and with- 



156 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

out Him nothing was made." Heracleon was an- 
other disciple and a distinguished one. He was con- 
temporary with Valentine. He did not merely quote 
John, but wrote an entire commentary upon the 
fourth Gospel, fragments of which are preserved by 
Origen, in which it is plain that he sought ingeniously 
to gnosticize the whole book from beginning to end. 

But Valentine's school had a still earlier founder in 
Basilides, who also comes from Alexandria in Egypt. 
He flourished as early as 125. He wrote twenty-four 
books on the Gospels ; and that our four Gospels are 
the ones thus designated as a whole is nearly cer- 
tain. He quotes Luke and John word for word, and 
tries to bring their expressions into accord with his 
system. He also refers to the star of the Magians in 
Matthew. Moreover the divine octave, named from 
the principal terms of John's Proem, is at the basis 
of Basilides' whole scheme, and Valentine must have 
found it there.^ 

Here then we have a false and fantastic theory 
of Christianity elaborated by its authors, all through 
the second quarter of the second century, appeal- 
ing constantly to the four Gospels as authority, 
specially anxious to subsidize John and bend that 
to their purpose, and for that end writing a whole 

1 For these citations by the Gnostic heretics read Tischendorfs 
Wen wurden^ etc., pp. 19-23. For other citations see Bunsen's Hip- 
poly tus und seine zeit^ vol. i. pp. 63-66. 

For quotations of Basilides, and of his heresy generally, see Euse- 
bius, H. E.'iv. J. 



\ 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY, 1 5/ 

commentary upon the book ; involving so vitally 
the themes of that book, that sharp and bitter 
controversies took place between two parties in 
the Church, — the Orthodox and the heretics of 
that day, — and which continued down to the close 
of the century. Both parties appeal to one canon or 
rule of faith in which the Gospel of John is conspic- 
uous, for in its interpretation its grand themes were 
vitally concerned. There are men who try to make 
us believe that right in the midst of this debate, 
when appeals were made by keen-eyed controversial- 
ists to canonical Christian Scriptures, a new and 
spurious book, involving more than all the others the 
very matter in dispute, was foisted upon the Chris- 
tian public, received by everybody without a murmur 
of dissent, elevated to a place in the sacred Canon, 
and spread through various languages into all the 
Christian communions as of like authority. 

We will put a parallel case. We are separated 
by nearly one hundred years from the declaration of 
American independence, and the stirring events 
which led to the formation and adoption of the Con- 
stitution of the United States, the political canon of 
the country. After its adoption parties grew up, both 
appealing to its authority, both grounded on opposite 
interpretations. Suppose that just before our civil 
war broke out, the State Rights Party, not finding 
secession in the Constitution so plainly as they wished, 
got out a new chapter, added it to the old Constitu- 



158 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

tion, and proclaimed it as a genuine portion of the 
fundamental law ; and forthwith, and without dissent 
and simultaneously throughout the country, it is so 
regarded by all parties, quoted as such in Congress, 
cited in the courts of justice, and no trace of contro- 
versy about it was ever known or heard of A more 
monstrous violation of all the laws of historical evi- 
dence and probability, and even of the first principles 
which determine human conduct, could not well be 
conceived. And yet the parallel fails in two particulars 
to give the argument in its unconquerable strength. 
We are one people, and speak and write in the main 
one language. The early Christian communions 
were separated by the barriers of dialect and nation 
which would render a simultaneous or general recep- 
tion of a forgery a more violent impossibility. Our 
fundamental law concerns us only in our temporal 
affairs. Their fundamental law concerned them, so 
they thought, in their eternal well-being, and deter- 
mined the conditions of heaven and hell. 

V. We come to a species of evidence already in- 
dicated, which Tischendorf gives as the crowning 
portion of his argument for the New Testament 
canon. We have said that translations of the New 
Testament were made into other languages, for the 
use of the churches, and that these translations were 
the identical old Latin Itala and Syriac Peschito which 
have come down to us. They must have been made 
soon after the middle of the second century. This is 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY, 159 

certain from the quotations of Irenaeus and Tertul- 
lian. How is this ascertained ? 

The manuscripts of the New Testament were 
copied and recopied for the hundredth time, and it 
was inevitable that some mistakes would creep in. 
The mistakes do not affect the main substance and 
doctrine of the New Testament, but they run down 
into countless minutiae, such as the variation or 
omission of particles. Sometimes a word or a whole 
sentence has fallen out ; sometimes a word or sen- 
tence, which might have been originally a gloss in 
the margin, has crept into the text. Not ten years 
would have elapsed after a manuscript had been dis- 
missed from the hand of an apostle or his amanuensis 
to be copied and recopied, before these various read- 
ings would begin to appear. Of course the nearer we 
get towards the autograph of the writers the purer 
our text will be. Moreover it will be easy to see that 
this department of investigation furnishes the most 
absolutely certain of all circumstantial evidence to 
identify the received canon of any specified period, 
because the evidence branches into such delicate and 
interminable veins. The prince of scholars in this 
department is Tischendorf, who has made the explo- 
ration of it the main business of his life. 

We have said that the Greek text which preceded 
and formed the basis of the translations of the second 
century is clearly identified in the Codex Sinaiticus, 
including our New Testament with its four Gospels. 



l6o THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

We identify it, therefore, as the New Testament of 
the churches in the year 150 ; not of one church but 
of all ; not alone at Rome but at Carthage, where 
Tertullian used the Latin translation made from it : 
at Lyons in Gaul where Irenaeus used the same 
thirty years before him ; at Antioch in Syria, where 
Theophilus must have used the old Syriac version 
or its basis in the year 1 70 ; at Alexandria in Egypt, 
where Origen wrote, whose quotations are in striking 
agreement therewith. 

But the argument does not stop here. The Greek 
text in general use in the year 150, thus clearly iden- 
tified, though the purest we have is not absolutely 
pure. It had already been a great while in use, for 
it is clearly demonstrable that a rich text-his- 
tory LIES BEHIND IT. There is unmistakable evi- 
dence that it had already been copied and recopied 
and long passed from hand to hand. Tischendorf 
claims this as one of the most important and certain 
of the results of his labors. " If this is so," he says, 
" and there lies a long course of the text-history of 
our Gospels before the middle of the second century ; 
before the time when canonical authority, along with 
a settled church order threw up a strong barrier 
against private modifications of the sacred text, — 
and I pledge myself to give complete proof of this in 
its proper place, — then we must demand for this 
history the space at least of half a century. Must we 
not date, then — I will not say the origin of the Gos- 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY. l6l 

pels, — no ; but the beginning of the evangelical 
canon about the end of the first century ? And is 
not this result so much the more certain because all 
the historical facts of the second century which we 
have brought forward are in harmony therewith ? " 



We have exhibited in the two preceding chapters 
an outline of what is known as the historical or exter- 
nal evidence of the four Gospels. If the reader has 
imagined that it depends on uncertain traditions he 
will probably be surprised, if he has now surveyed it 
for the first time, at its cumulative and irresistible 
strength. He will ask, if there is not another side to 
the argument. There is undoubtedly another side, 
but there is none that we know of which can change 
the aspect of the case unless we say that all history 
is baseless and fabulous. We notice briefly two 
objections which may be supposed to break the force 
of the historical argument as we have stated it. 

I. The Alogians, a small and obscure sect, ap- 
peared in Asia Minor soon after the middle of the 
second century, who rejected the fourth Gospel and 
the Apocalypse. Montanus and his followers who 
claimed the special gift of the Holy Spirit, and an- 
nounced the coming of the millennium, had appealed 
to John's Gospel to support their fanaticism, claim- 



II 



1 62 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

ing for themselves the promise of the Paraclete and 
its realization. This extravagance the Alogians op- 
posed. They met it with a denial that John wrote 
the fourth Gospel, asserted its inconsistency with the 
other three, and ascribed it to Cerinthus, the con- 
temporary of John. Baur makes much of this fact. 
What does it really prove } Two things : — 

First, that the Gospels were generally appealed to 
as canonical authority in the Church at the middle of 
the second century, and that the fourth was univer- 
sally received as genuine, — a small sect who could 
not believe its doctrines because of their own ration- 
alizing tendency being an exception to a general rule. 
Second, that the fourth Gospel as then known and 
received, was not a recent book, for the very men 
who seek to set aside its authority, assign its origin 
to the times of John, though most absurdly to Ce- 
rinthus, whom John opposed. 

The fact argues not against the genuineness of the 
book, but strongly in its favor, and absolutely annihi- 
lates the pretension that it could have originated after 
the middle of the second century. 

2. Another ground of objection is as follows : The 
verdict of the second century touching the genuine- 
ness of historical works, cannot be accepted as final, 
because the lav/s of historical evidence were not then 
understood. Learned men even wer^ credulous and 
easily imposed upon. Works were then received 
which we know now to be forgeries, and quoted by 



WITNESSES OF THE SECOND CENTURY, 1 63 

such men as Justin and Tertullian ; and there are 
writings in our Canon at this time, such as the Epistle 
of Jude and the Second of Peter, which were not 
written by the men whose names they bear. 

There are two plain answers to this. One may 
be as completely disqualified by skepticism as by 
credulity for applying the laws of historical evidence. 
The habit of doubting, caviling, perverting, and 
emptying words of their meaning, in order to suborn 
the facts of history to suit our theories, may even 
bring mist and darkness over a whole province of his- 
tory which lies else in peaceful sunlight. We have 
no right to assume as a foregone conclusion, that the 
supernatural can only appear in the natural, as we 
have seen it, and then make our assumption an axiom 
of universal criticism. Yet this is what Strauss ex- 
pressly and Baur impliedly have done. Allowing that 
there is a spiritual world, and therefore that the 
class of facts which the New Testament records, is 
possible, writers of the second century may be vastly 
better qualified to judge the record of them impar- 
tially, than those of the nineteenth, whose minds are 
darkened by a narrow or one-sided philosophy. Writ- 
ers of the Alexandrian School, to name no others, 
such as Origen, Clement, and Pantaenus so far as he 
is known to us, were learned men, not unskilled in 
historical criticism ; and added to these qualifications 
were intuitions made quick and clear by the breath- 
ings of the Holy Spirit to discern the Scripture that 
throbbed freshly with its life. 



164 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

But in addition to this, there was the communis 
sensMs of the Christian Church when its glory was 
unstained by worldly ambitions or sectarian strifes. 
The Christ of Scripture then glowed warmly as the 
Christ of consciousness. Spurious documents might 
obtain temporary or local currency. But they would 
differ from the genuine as a daub from a landscape, j 
and though individuals might be deceived, the Church 
CathoUc would shed them off by the Power that 
reigned alike in its Bible and in the souls which it 
had redeemed and purified. 

But the argument does not proceed solely under 
the authority of these writers of the second century, 
nor that of the church to which they belonged. It is 
various and cumulative, gathering strength and vol- 
ume with every new investigation and every new- 
discovery of documents. Our supposed better knowl- 
edge of the science of history, and more sure ap- 
plication of the rules which apply to it, do not bring 
the subject of the New Testament canon into greater 
doubt and difficulty, but bring it rather within the 
resolving power of a surer and more enlightened 
criticism. 



CHAPTER VII. 

CHRISTIANITY AS A NEW INFLUX OF POWER.^ 

IT ROM the close of the second century up to 
^ about the year 50 there is an order of phenom- 
ena not dwelt upon in profane history, nor much in 
popular histories of any kind ; not because they are 
less authenticated than any other class of events, but 
because historians writing from the view-point of 
naturalism do not know what to make of them, and 
ignore them. They are not confined to the period 
above indicated. They belong in some sort to the 
more interior history of the Church in all ages. But 
during the period indicated they are marked and 
palpable, and unmixed with papal legends and im- 
postures ; for the hierarchy had not then arisen, and 
the Church was in her bridal robes. They were 
then new, taking the Church itself by surprise, un- 
known to the old effete religions as then existing, 
whether Jewish or Pagan. 

This new order of phenomena may be described 

1 The principal authorities for this chapter beside the New Testa- 
ment are Origen, Tertullian, and Justin. They are cited and en- 
larged upon by Neander in the first section of his Church Historyy 
and in his Memorials of Christian Life, Part I. ch. i. 



I 
\ 

1 66 TlfE FOURTH GOSPEL, j| 

as a disturbance everywhere of the old equihbrium 
of forces, social, moral, and spiritual. There were 
perturbations in the old system of statics like those 
which the astronomers observed among the planetary 
bodies, while yet the orbit of Uranus was supposed 
to be the boundary of our solar system. There must 
be the proximity, said Leverrier, of some body or 
system of bodies which we have never taken into 
the account ; and so marked and decisive was the 
influence that he directed his telescope with the ut- 
most confidence that the unknown disturber would 
swim into its field. The disturbance, however, in the 
field of history is so great as not only to produce 
irregularities of motion but to break up the old sys- 
tem of forces altogether and direct them anew. 

We get a very poor and inadequate conception of 
the introduction of Christianity into this world when v 
we imagine its Apostles going about and making an 
exhibition of miraculous performances as proofs of 
their message. The miracles did not cause the spread 
of Christianity, but were simply its outcome on the 
plane of nature. Christianity came only when the 
spiritual heavens were brought in closer and more 
naked contact with the human mind, and hence pro- 
duced a NEW INFLUX OF POWER in human nature 
itself 

In comparing two coterminous periods of history, 
it is easy sometimes to see the second in the first, 
and to regard one as simply a development of the 



CHRISTIANITY A NEW INFIUX OF POWER. 167 

Other. Thus the Protestant reformation was heralded 
a century before it came by signs which announced 
its approach, — to use the rhetoric of Coleridge, — as 
clearly as the purple clouds of the dawn announce 
the approach of morning. It is the past developing 
into the future. Let the historian scan the age of 
Augustus Caesar and he will find there the science, 
the philosophy, the jurisprudence, the natural culture, 
and the religions, Hellenic, Jewish, and Roman, of 
the two centuries following ; to be modified as they 
might be by the ordinary forces of human develop- 
ment. The cause of the disturbances which we are 
about to notice he will not find ; and unless he re- 
sorts to celestial observations he will set his glass in 
vain. 

The new influx of power is traceable as one of the 
divine signatures of Christianity generally, but is 
found all through the second century, and always in 
connection with and within the circle of Christian 
ideas and the Christian communions. We mean by 
the influx of power, not the voluntary and normal 
forces of education and culture, but a new force, and 
one before unknown in the world, lying back of all 
human volition, producing a new creation out of the 
old chaos and transforming human nature itself. 
This is manifest in various ways. 

I. First and on its lowest plane of operation, there 
is a new power of mind over matter, of the spirit 
I over the body, found principally in a healing and 



1 68 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

cleansing divine life, flowing downward and outward 
into its lowest forms. Of course this would be seen 
first in the cure of nervous diseases, because the 
nerves are the inmost texture of the physical body 
and join it with the spiritual, but it is seen in a restor- 
ative hand laid on all the diseases of the human 
form. This was called " miracle " in the language of 
the times, because it came as a surprise, but it was 
in conformity with universal spiritual laws operating 
within the natural as the heavens were pressing anew 
into the affairs of earth. For these phenomena we 
depend on no uncertain and private testimony, and 
they are altogether different in kind from the lying 
miracles of the monks of the middle ages. Origen 
appeals to them as matters of common, experience. 
Grievous diseases and states of insanity, which had 
withstood all other means of the healing art, disap- 
pear when the subjects of them are brought within 
the circle of Christian truth and influence. No tricks 
of jugglery were used, but healing power ran down 
through the mind and the nerves and the whole phys- 
ical frame, the entire outward man being recreated 
from within. Tertullian and Justin Martyr make the 
same appeal. They cite these facts as notorious. 
" That the kingdom of evil spirits," says the latter, 
" has been destroyed by Jesus, you may even at the 
present time convince yourselves by what passes be- 
fore your own eyes ; for many of our people, of us 
Christians, have healed aud still continue to heal in 



CHRISTIANITY A NEW I NFL UX OF PO WER. \ 69 

every part of the world, and in your city of Rome, 
numbers possessed of evil spirits, such as could not 
be healed by other exorcists, simply by adjuring them 
in the name of Jesus Christ." Irenaeus says the same, 
and declares that many came into the Christian pro- 
fession because the evil influx which we call insanity, 
and which then held so many minds in baleful eclipse, 
receded and went out before the reviving glory of the 
inflowing Christ when the subjects came to them- 
selves and rejoiced in their right minds. 

So full and vital was this new influx of power that 
sometimes the apparent dead were brought back to 
life. We say apparent dead, for we will not assume 
as yet to know the exact line which divides the mys- 
terious realms of life and death in putting off" mortal- 
ity, or that turning back and recrossing the line is a 
possibility within the supreme divine order. We 
only say that those who to the common apprehension 
had died, sometimes had a reviving consciousness 
within the sphere of Christian influx, and lived years 
afterwards as well known witnesses of it in the Chris- 
tian Church. To this fact Irenaeus bears unexcep- 
tionable testimony. But it is only one class of facts 
among others, notorious and well attested through 
the whole period in review, showing that the healing 
and restoring mercy was not only in first things but 
last things, not only h^ ^PXV> but in the ultimations of 
the natural wojrld. 

2. A quickening of the interior perceptions re* 



I JO THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

suiting frequently in open spiritual vision, is another 
remarkable phenomenon of the period under review. 
It is found as late as the times of Origen, but it is 
continuous and more intense as we ascend the 
stream. As we find it in this period it has nothing 
in common with the visions of the monks, real or 
pretended, of a later age. It often came unsought, 
and to those outside the communion of the Christian 
Church, and ignorant of its system of faith, yet bear- 
ing in upon them gleams and intuitions of the same 
truths that lie at the centre of the Christian system. 
We mistake altogether when we suppose that a few 
Unlettered men, merely by means of personal persua- 
sion and eloquence, spread the Gospel laterally from 
Palestine throughout the Roman empire, as we find it 
in the second century. No wonder that Mr. Gibbon 
is nonplussed when he tries to account for its rapid, 
almost simultaneous diffusion, as if it had spread of 
itself. There is a large class of facts perfectly well 
attested, even while we keep within the track of com- 
mon history, showing that the descending heavens 
were urging their transcendent realities into all re- 
ceptive minds, sometimes with power so great that 
their scenery lay visibly upon the opening soul. 
Tertullian says the majority in his time came to a 
knowledge of the true God by visions (e visionibus) ; 
that is, they came into the Christian Church not be- 
cause its truths had first been urged uppn them from 
vithout, but because they had been borne in from 



CHRISTIANITY A NEW I NFL UX OF PO WER. 1 7 1 

above. Tertullian probably exaggerates, as he was 
wont to do, but Origen afl&rms the same class of facts 
not only as well known in the Christian communions, 
but as within his personal knowledge and experi- 
ence, and calls God to witness the truth of what he 
says. These testimonies are important, not only as 
accounting to us for the rapid diffusion of Christian- 
ity in this early time, but for its invincible grasp 
upon the common mind, showing it a religion which 
prevailed, not so much by propagandism as by its 
outcome from the heart of God into the heart of 
humanity, prepared by some new agency for its re- 
ception. 

3. Closely connected with the order of phenomena 
just named was another not less remarkable. The 
realities of a super-sensible world through all this 
period within the Christian communions are not so 
much matters of faith as of knowledge. Lying on 
the general face of society throughout the Roman 
empire there is darkness on this subject that might 
be felt. The philosophers did not believe their own 
speculations, nor the poets the creations of their im- 
aginations, " much less did the common mind have 
any intelligent convictions whatsoever. The Roman 
Senate might be said to represent the best culture 
and intelligence pertaining to religion, philosophy, 
science, and morals, which their times afforded. In 
the debate as to what disposition should be made of 
Catiline's conspirators, Julius Caesar, then the High 



1/2 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

Priest of the national religion, rose and opposed cap- 
ital punishment, on the ground that death was the 
extinction of conscious existence, and therefore was 
not so much punishment as a release from it, thus 
publicly in the face of the Senate denying the immor- 
tality of the soul. Cato was there ; and Cicero, who 
wrote the Tusculan Questions, was there. Both re- 
plied, and their replies are reported, but on this all 
important point they made no distinct issue with 
Caesar, showing that even with the best minds the 
doctrine of immortality was only an airy hypothesis. 
There had been no change in this respect in the 
times which we have under review, except that they 
present the following remarkable phenomena. In the 
dense and general darkness we see little communions 
called churches, dotting the regions of night like 
spangles of gold and silver, gradually enlarging their 
circuit, while into each the heavens were open, and 
tidings of God and immortality were flowing free. 
Here was something which the age itself could not 
understand, and which we shall understand just as 
little if we suppose that this new faith subliming into 
knowledge was merely wrought by preachers who 
proved their assertions by miracles, or by reading the 
New Testament documents. Any one must see that 
such causes merely operating ab extra, were quite in- 
adequate to produce such results. 

4. But perhaps more remarkable yet was the new 
transforming power over human nature, everywhere 



CHRISTIANITY A NEW I NFL UX OF PO WER, 1 73 

lifting it up and cleansing it. It is not merely the 
reformation of manners that now meets our obser- 
vation. It is the new and original types of charac- 
ter, and what is quite as remarkable, they were 
evolved out of the very material which a philosopher 
would have passed by as worthless. And more re- 
markable yet, they were evolved very often without 
the will, and even against the will of the subjects 
themselves, when those subjects were brought within 
the circle and operation of the new influence. There 
was some power lying behind all personal volition, 
and choice, transfusing the subject's whole being and 
bringing a new creation out of it which astonished 
himself as much as any one. Undoubtedly there 
was some preparation in the experience of such men, 
which made their natures ductile under the new su- 
pernatural influence ; they were not made subjects of 
it by arbitrary selection ; what we mean to say is, it 
came to them without their seeking ; they did not go 
after it and find it, but it came and found them, and 
lifted them out of the grooves they had moved in, 
with a force they no more thought of resisting than 
the sea-weed torn up by the roots would resist the 
swellings of the tides.^ 

Celsus, who wrote against Christianity, evidently 

1 Origen says in his treatise, Contra Celsus, " Many, as it were, 
against their will, have been brought over to Christianity ; since a 
certain Spirit suddenly turned their reason from hatred against Chris- 
tianity into zealous attachment even at the cost of their lives, and 
presented certain images before the soul either awake or in vision." 



174 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

with great subtlety and acumen, makes it one of his 
sharpest points of objection that it professes to ac- 
compUsh impossibiUties ; that the idea of changing 
human nature, and making it over is utterly absurd. 
" It is manifest to every one," says he, ^' that it lies 
within no man's power to produce an entire change 
in a person to whom sin has become a second nature, 
even by punishment, to say nothing of mercy, for to 
effect a complete change of nature, is the most dif- 
ficult of things." To this the Christian apologists 
replied in substance : Come and learn for yourselves. 
Come into our assemblies and see what and who we 
are, and from what ranks and conditions we have 
been gathered. See how the old savagery and hate 
have been expelled from us, and how we can now 
love our neighbors as ourselves, and forgive our 
enemies and render good for evil, and blessing for 
cursing. 

We have two scenes presented to us : one in Lyons, 
and one in Smyrna of lesser Asia, in which the new 
type of character is brought in vivid contrast with 
the depravity of the age out of which it had been 
won. We mean the persecutions and martyrdoms 
described in the letters sent out by those churches 
making known their calamity to sister churches. We 
make all due allowance for the enthusiasm inspired 
by Christian faith, but even then we witness virtues 
and graces of character and examples of a renewed 
and sanctified human nature wrought out of the low- 



CHRIS TIANJTY A NEW I NFL UX OF PO WER. 1 7 5 

est and roughest material, far more illustrious than 
any other miracles that we know of. It is magnan- 
imity, faith, love, patience, heroism, and the sweet- 
est spirit of forgiveness appearing like an " orb of 
tranquillity " in a general storm of hate, revenge, and 
cruelty. To their tortures by racks, by pincers, by 
faggots, by the tossings of wild beasts, by being 
seated in burning chairs that the fumes of their 
roasting flesh might come up about them, amid scoffs 
and jeers from the rabble and when a word of retrac- 
tion would have saved them, " They went on joyful, 
much glory and grace being mixed in their faces, so 
that their bonds seemed to form noble ornaments, 
and like those of a bride adorned with various golden 
bracelets, and impregnated with the sweet odor of 
Christ, they appeared to some anointed with earthly 
perfumes." ^ 

These great changes were not developments out 
of the age, but of a Power which was reversing its 
tides. They were wrought everywhere in the name 
of Christ, and within the influence of Christian ideas 
and the Christian communions ; very often the new 
influx from within meeting the presentation of truth 
from without as by a stroke of God. Thus from the 
ruins of a reversed and degraded humanity as a 
background they bring out these portraitures of an- 

1 For an account of these martyrdoms given in the Letters of the 
Churches of Lyons and Smyrna, see Eusebius, lib- iv. c. 15 ; also lib. 
V. c. i. 



176 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

gelic life and beauty. The change in these persons 
could not be better described than by saying " the 
Holy Ghost fell on them;" for not any voluntary 
agency had wrought the change, but a sudden in- 
come of power through the consciousness. These 
phenomena occur as you ascend along the second 
century into and towards the middle of the first, and 
they appear in the moral world like those you would 
witness in the natural if you went out at mid-winter 
when the ground was covered with snow^ and the 
forests tinkled with ice, amid which a few trees scat- 
tered here and there were appearing in the bloom 
and the greenness of their summer glories. Any 
mind of the least philosophical bent and untram- 
meled by false theories, ascending the stream of his- 
tory, would conclude that " something had happened," 
and that this something was of a very extraordinary 
character thus to turn the stream out of its course. 

Ascending through this series of phenomena we 
come to the times embraced in our New Testament 
canon. The reader will see that the earliest of our 
ecclesiastical history does not stand forth as excep- 
tional ; that the annals of the Church for more 
than a century afterward, to come down no further, 
give us a continuation of the same order of events 
described by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, 
and of the dispensation of the Spirit inaugurated on 
the day of the Pentecost. The current of history as 
we ascend, prepares us for the events they record 



CHRISTIANITY A NEW INFL UX OF PO WER. I J J 

SO that they break upon us without surprise. We 
ascend and note the perturbations with expectant 
minds, — Uke Dr. Kane's men travelling northward 
and watching the flight of summer birds and the 
growing evidence of some mysterious and warmer 
clime, till the open Polar Sea broke on their sight, 
its waters shimmering in the sun and its waves dash- 
ing at their feet. 

Ascending this stream we come to a literature un- 
questionably genuine, bringing us into the very at- 
mosphere of the warm open sea. There is one man 
who appears as the central figure of this literature ; 
whose writings and personal history, while they are 
entirely congenerous with the history we have been 
now tracing, fling a light over the whole, disclosing 
the causes, and the only adequate ones, of these mys- 
terious perturbations. 

There was a man who started from Jerusalem 
towards Damascus on a mission of persecution, 
proud, cruel, and vindictive ; he came from Damas- 
cus with a heart yearning towards all mankind, with 
the humility of a child, and with affections as tender 
as a woman's love. He went towards Damascus 
with an intellect narrowed down to a rapier's point 
and harder than its steel ; he came from Damascus 
with an intellect broadened and fused with divine 
fire, and with a logic so invincible, and with its links 
so warm with the Holy Ghost, that it moulded the 
thought of the world for eighteen centuries. What 

. 12 



178 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

does his change date from ? Epileptic fits, says Dr. 
Strauss.^ I met Jesus Christ on the way, says Paul, 
in a light from heaven which dimmed the Syrian 
noon. 

We are brought to the earliest literature of the 
Church in the authentic letters of this most distin- 
guished among the converts to the Christian faith. 
Some of them were written not more than twenty 
years after the death and ascension of Christ. Four 
of them, — and those the most important, — the 
most exacting criticism has never called in question. 
Nine of them are conceded as genuine in the criti- 
cism of Renan, who is sufficiently exacting and fas- 
tidious for the most refined scepticism. Thirteen 
we regard as genuine beyond all reasonable doubt or 
cavil ; and only the Epistle to the Hebrews, so called, 
popularly ascribed to Paul, has been shown very 
clearly from evidence internal and external to have 
emanated from some other source. 

Later than these letters, we have the history as- 
cribed to Luke, — the Acts of the Apostles, about 
half of which is a record of Paul's life and labors. 
•The first chapters Renan considers as legendary be- 
cause of the supernatural events there narrated, 
which by his theory cannot come within the range of 
authentic history. The " tendency theory " of Baur 
makes the whole book a compilation of the second 
century. The critics of the anti-supernatural school 

1 In his last Leben Jesu^ p. 302. 



CHRISTIANITY A NE W INFL UX OF PO WER, 1 79 

agree together as to the status of Paul. " The 
Christ," says Renan, who gives him personal revela- 
tions, " is his own phantom ; it is himself he hears 
while thinking he hears Jesus/'^ 

Their criticisms of the book of Acts are futile so 
far as designed to shut out and keep out the super- 
natural. Those letters which Renan concedes were 
written by Paul beyond all reasonable question, con- 
tain the essential elements of the book of Acts, in- 
clude in their range the most important events which 
it records, while at the same time leading us up to 
the very spot where the gates open and the new in- 
flux of power comes in to sweep down the Christian 
ages and carry the old land-marks of history before it 
as drift wood upon the waves. If you tamper with 
the book of Acts you may just as well keep on and 
tamper with all the history that follows in continuous 
stream for more than three hundred years. It were 
as if Dr. Livingstone, in following up the Nile to its 
origin, should come to a thicket out of whose shad- 
ows a copious flood of waters is swelling free, and 
should say. Here, I think, we have found its source. 
We will go no farther, for the river has come to an 
end. 

Paul had never seen the Lord Jesus Christ in the 
flesh. He tells us, too, that he conferred not with 
flesh and blood ; he did not receive Christianity from 
any other persons who had seen the Lord Jesus in 

\ Life of Saint Paul^ ch. xxi. 



l8o THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

the flesh. How then did he receive it ? He says 
that after his conversion he went into Arabia, and 
thence returned to Damascus, and only after three 
years went up to Jerusalem.^ Meanwhile he gives us 
to understand that the Christianity he was to preach 
and expound he received by direct revelation from 
Jesus Christ, and in such completeness and integrity, 
and with such grasp on its interior truths, that some 
who had been with Christ all the days of his mission 
on earth were left far below him, sticking as yet in 
the mere letter, and only to be released from its 
scales as he had been, by the new influx of power 
from the risen and glorified. This Jew, imprisoned 
of late in the hardest Jewish shell, appears suddenly 
with the shell shattered in pieces under his feet, 
looking down upon it in triumphant scorn, much as 
we may suppose the immortal spirit new-risen in 
glory looks down on the body which lately incum- 
bered it. Moreover, a whole system of truth, diviner 
and lovelier than he had ever dreamed of, he now 
holds and expounds as a concrete reality, involving a 
new doctrine of God, of man, of justification and 
redemption, of the resurrection, of the Church as a 
universal brotherhood, and the kingdom of Christ as 
the universal reign of righteousness on the earth. 
All this, he says, " I neither received of man, 
neither was I taught it but by the revelation of Jesus 
Christ." Not only so, but the ordinances of Chris- 

} Gal. i. 1 1-24. 



CHRISTIANITY A NEW I NFL UX OF PO WER. 1 8 1 

tianity which were to symbolize its truths forever, he 
says, were given him direct from the Lord Jesus, and 
the scene of the Last Supper is described, and the 
language repeated by which the ordinance was first 
established, coinciding substantially with the account 
which the synoptics gave some time afterwards from 
their own memory of the scene.^ 

Moreover, in times of perplexity and fierce opposi- 
tion from unbelievers when difficulties seemed to 
close him round as a wall of adamant, he says the 
Lord Jesus stood by him to cheer him on, or his 
angels encircled him in bright array, and an open 
path was then made for him, or the prison doors 
opened and he went triumphant on his mission.^ 
Not by seductive eloquence, not by human logic 
alone, often by simple prayer and the laying on of 
hands, came the influx of power involving all present 
in a sphere of new life and of transforming grace, and 
lifting up their interior minds to quick-coming con- 
ceptions of truth that shamed all the philosophies of 
the age. Moreover, this Paul, once so hard and bit- 
ter with theologic hate, becomes under the new in- 
flux as tender hearted as a child, and writes that 
chapter on charity which has been a sweet lyric of 
the heart, and tongued its highest inspiration to the 
present hour. 

1 Compare i Cor. xi. 23-26 and Matt. xxvi. 26-29 ; Mark xiv. 
22-25 ; Luke xxii. 17-20. 

2 Compare Romans xv. 18, 19; 2 Cor. xii. 1-12 ; Gal. ii. 2 ; Acts 
xvi. 25, 26. 



1 82 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

Those things in the book of Acts at which the 
skeptical critics boggle most, the speaking with new 
tongues, the visions of supernal realities, the miracu- 
lous healing, the incoming of the Holy Ghost at the 
name of Christ, are all found in Paul's unquestioned 
letters to the churches, and we are cornered up to 
two alternatives in tracing Christianity to its origin. 
The system of truth and influence which in its broad- 
ening course raised Europe out of barbarism, found 
England a horde of savages, and made it the England 
of to-day, shattered the Roman empire, and on the 
ruins of the old paganism to which the heavens were 
nearly closed, formed the Christian communions, into 
which tidings of immortality came full and free, — 
this system, followed up in history to the earliest 
literature which attempts to account for its origin, is 
found in the writings of a man who had epileptic fits, 
or swoons, in which he saw a phantom which he 
called Jesus, — or else to a real Jesus Christ, through 
whom the heavens were opened, and swept the in- 
most chords of our human nature with the sovereign 
grace and transforming power of Almighty God. 

It has become fashionable of late to decry Paley 
and " the Paley men." His unpardonable sin is the 
perfect transparency of his style and thought. What 
he saw he saw in sunlight, though he did not see 
very deep and far ; and he had the rare faculty of 
making his reader see exactly what he saw himself. 
He never pretended to tell what he did not see, and 



CHRISTIANITY A NEW I NFL UX OF FO WER, 1 83 

call his subjective fog-shapes the advanced thought 
of his age. Hence his offense to theology. He 
wrote a little book, which may still be found on the 
neglected shelves of old libraries, which is a masterly 
demonstration through internal circumstantial evi- 
dence and mutual corroboration of the authenticity 
of the book of Acts and the Pauline letters. It has 
never been answered, for the excellent reason that 
it does not admit of any answer. As respects the 
Epistles and the book of Acts, Mr. Andrews Norton 
very "^ell says Paley has " put the matter at rest." ^ 

1 Paley's argument in the HorcB Paulince, and the kind of evidence 
which he exhibits, may be illustrated in this way, — 

A piece of paper was once found which had served as the wadding 
of a musket. Unrolled, it was found to be part of a newspaper which 
had been torn in two. If the missing portion could be found in the 
possession of certain.parties certain facts of great local interest could 
be established. Another piece was found, but how could it be iden- 
tified as the missing one ? Why, the torn edges fitted exactly to- 
gether. Not only so, but the torn words also came together so as to 
make sense and meaning along the whole line of separation. Nobody 
doubted, of course, that the two pieces made originally one whole. 
This gives some idea of the way in which the facts and allusions of 
the book of Acts and the Pauline letters fit together and interpene- 
trate, as belonging to one historic whole. They run into minutiae 
and delicate coincidence which no forger would have dreamed of and 
no mere compiler could have happened upon. Paley's argument 
must be read to be appreciated, and when read it gives the go-by to 
the boundless guessings of Baur's " tendency theory and " the critique 
of Renan on the four letters which he rejects as spurious. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE PAUSE IN HISTORY. 



I 



T N the last chapter we ascended the stream of 
-* Christian history through the two first centuries 
of the Christian era. Let us reverse this process. 
Let us come down from the other side and see' what 
forces there were out of which Christianity could 
have been developed in the natural course of human 
progress. 

The Greek culture and . philosophy had their con- 
summation in Plato four hundred years before Christ. 
We should anticipate were we to describe here that 
marvelous achievement of human genius. We will 
only say now that nowhere else do we find a system 
wrought out by the human intellect which anticipates 
so nearly the truths of Christianity. Nowhere before 
or* since that we can discover has human culture ad- 
vanced so far or caught brighter gleams of thehigher 
realities. If humanity was to come by development 
into the open light of a spirit-world, it should have 
been from the Hellenic rehgious consciousness. 
Hence onward, however, its course in this line of 
development is ever downward. 

At about 150 B. c. Greece was merged in the 



THE PAUSE IN HISTORY. 1 85 

Roman empire and became a part of it. In the wide- 
spread servility of the empire there is a dreary desert 
varied only by changes from unbelief to superstition, 
and from blank despair to a kindling hope that some 
divine interposition might be nigh. From the Acad- 
emy to the Lyceum, from the Lyceum to the Porch, 
and from the Porch to the New Academy, the gravi- 
tation is sure and continuous towards NihiHsm, — the 
crumbling away of all the foundations of faith and 
knowledge. Plato lived in the future ; he was the 
child of hope and aspiration. He saw an interior way 
which led the soul upward to God, and to a per- 
sonal immortality in her native star where once more 
she shall hear the music of the heavenly spheres. 
All this is fantasy to the intensely logical and prac- 
tical mind of Aristotle. He scouted the ideals of 
Plato. He started from sensuous phenomena as the 
prime grounds t)f human knowledge, and from this 
the steps of his logic did not conduct him to the im- 
mortality of the soul. Aristotle acknowledges the 
Supreme Reason, the God of Plato ; God and the 
World have had an eternal co-existence. But they 
have no such inexistence as Plato had taught. The 
Cosmos has a potentiality of its own, and God is in 
it only as a foreign element. Its changes are not a 
continuous progress from lower to higher towards 
some goal of ideal perfection, but oscillations back 
and forth within its own limitations. With Aristotle 
there is no ever-brightening future for the world or 



1 86 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

for humanity. The stoics who build upon him do 
not hke him separate the world from God. They 
sink God in the world. They identify them as body 
and soul, as essence and form ; God the essence 
being a divine fire, and matter being an evolution 
out of it, to undergo periodic involution, — that is, be 
consumed and taken back into the divine essence 
again. This periodic evolution and involution make 
up the grand aeons of the universe, its conflagration 
and recreation. They are what always has been and 
always will be, the eternal round and round of the 
Divine activity, according to the laws of fate, which 
man can neither escape nor change. Man is the 
plaything of this eternal gyration, appearing one mo- 
ment on the phenomenal surface, to disappear the 
next and be sucked back on his way to absorption in 
the eternal essence. This stoic fatalism inspired the 
patience of great minds, accepting the inevitable, 
putting on the pride of a godlike courage that could 
scorn alike the pains and pleasures of the hour, and 
like Lear meet the winds and the thunderbolts with 
kingly defiance. Nevertheless, in this amazing de- 
scent from Plato to Zeno it is remarkable how hu- 
manity, divested of immortal life, has retired into the 
background, and in the alternate rise and subsidence 
of the tides of being and non-being, man belongs 
ever to the latter division, and is the froth on the 
highest curl of the waves. 

From Zeno to Arcesilaus, the founder of the New 



THE PAUSE IN HISTORY. 1 8/ 

Academy, the strenuous opponent of the stoic phi- 
losophy, the transition is natural and easy enough. 
It is natural, that is, to distrust the grounds of knowl- 
edge when knowledge leads to the brink of despair. 
Arcesilaus, planting himself on the doctrine of the 
old masters, Plato and Aristotle, denied the validity 
both of sensuous reason and intellectual intuition. 
For denial of the first he had abundant authority in 
Plato ; for denial of the second he had abundant au- 
thority in Aristotle. They cancel each other like 
positive and negative ; each is positive where the 
other is negative, and each is negative where the 
other is positive, and the result is nothing. The 
disciples of the New Academy can defend with equal 
eloquence any proposition and its opposite, and prove 
both sides true and false at the same time. Car- 
neades, once a stoic himself, but afterwards a zealous 
convert of the New Academy, came to Rome with 
great affluence of learning and a most bewitching 
eloquence. He was sent thither by Athens as her 
ambassador because of his persuasive oratory. There 
he delivered his famous discourses for and against 
justice ; speaking first in support and then in oppo- 
sition to the same doctrines both in philosophy and 
morals. The young men were enchanted ; and Cato 
insisted that the ambassadors from Greece should 
be dismissed with all possible despatch lest their 
prolonged stay should corrupt the youth of Rome. 
But Rome was already corrupt, for faith was every- 



1 88 . THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

where dead, and the flooring of all knowledge had 
fallen through. The Greek religion had spent its 
force. It had awakened aspirations which it could 
not satisfy. It had caught gleams of beautiful ideals 
which it could not incarnate. It had found rents 
through the mist into a golden age of the past and a 
golden age of the future. But that future was an 
enchanted island across stormy waves. It might be 
a dream and not a reality, and the darkness had come 
down again like a cover and shut it clean out. There 
was nothing in the Roman religion which could take 
the place of the Hellenic or was fit to supersede it. 
It had no prophets nor seers ; no openings upward 
or forward ; only a heavy ritual to be worked mechan- 
ically by priests and haruspices. Its mvsteries were 
not those of Apollo and his choir, — 

" Who hynin the great Father 
Of all things ; and then 
The rest of Immortals, 
The actions of men ; '* 

but they consisted in the shape and appearance of the 
entrails of animals, in the flight of birds to right or 
left, or in the alternatives " whether the sacred chick- 
ens ate greedily or hung their heads ! " As religion 
sank down into sense the worship of the gods was 
superseded by the worship of the Emperor. Their 
statues were decapitated, and the head of the Em- 
peror placed upon them. The Jupiter Olympus of 
Phidias ending with the bust of Caligula, represents 



THE PAUSE IN HISTORY, 189 

pretty well the change of faith from its heavenly 
idealizations to the ugly features of the time. Of 
course sensible men had no faith in the fooleries of 
the haruspices, and only believed in them as having 
some influence over superstitious and vulgar minds. 
Cicero, who wrote the "Tusculan Questions" and 
" De Natura Deorum," accepts, nevertheless, the con- 
clusions of the New Academy ; and declaring it im- 
possible to rise beyond the probable, and deploring 
the sad necessity of renouncing the discovery of 
truth, he cries out bitterly that he doubts of all, and 
of himself. Seneca relapses into the stoic pantheism, 
declares God inseparable from nature, and divinizes 
the sun. Caesar we said, proclaimed from the Senate- 
house that death is the extinguishment of all con- 
scious existence, and nobody seriously disputed him.^ 

1 The Roman Senate were convened December 5, B. c. 63, in the 
Temple of Concord, to decide on the fate of the fellow conspirators of 
Catiline who had been arrested and were held in custody. At no 
time was the civil and religious character of the Senate more con- 
spicuously represented. The proposition is before them to put the 
prisoners to death. Caesar opposed the motion on the ground that 
death was an end of all consciousness and therefore too mild a pun- 
ishment. Cato and Cicero were in favor of it. The debate consti- 
tutes one of the curious passages of history. Caesar was Chief Pon- 
tiff, the highest functionary of the State Religion. 

Sallust thus reports Caesar : — 

" De poena possumus equidem dicere id quod res habet ; in luctu 
atque miseris mortem aerumnarumjequiem, non cruciatem esse ; earn 
cuncta mortalium mala dissolver^,; ultra neque curae neque gaudii 
locum esse." — i5^//. Cat., ch. 51. 

*' In grief and misery death is not torture but a rest from troubles ; 



IQO THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

Magicians and fortune-tellers stroll about everywhere, 
and these mercenary vagabonds become the self- 
assumed interpreters of the mysteries of life. In the 
dumbness of the oracles and the awful hush on the 
minds of men, we can easily believe Plutarch where 
he says that a voice, — "Great Pan is dead !" seemed 
to come from the sea, articulate in the booming of 
its waves. 

Two results follow inevitably the decay of faith 
and the paralysis of the religious faculty. Sorrow is 
without consolation, and cries into vacancy ; morality 
is without support, and human nature relapses fright- 
fully into its native savagery. How piteous are the 
plaints of bereavement and how barren the topics of 

it dissolves all the ills of mortals ; beyond there is no place either 
for sorrow or joy." 

Cato replied, following closely and refuting generally all Caesar's 
political arguments ; but coming to this he bestows on it a single 
sentence which sounds very much like delicate satire of the popular 
faith. He says, — 

*' Bene et composite, C. Caesar paulo ante in hoc ordine, de vita et 
morte disseruit ; falsa, credo, existimans, quae de inferis memoran- 
tur ; diverso itinere malos a bonis loca tetra, inculta, foeda atque 
formidolosa habere." — Ch. 52. 

** Very well and in good order Caesar a little before in this connec- 
tion, discourses about life and death ; thinking, I really believe, those 
things to be false which they tell us about Hades ; that the wicked 
go a different way from the good into places that are foul, rough, 
fetid, and fearful." 

What Cato thought himself on this point he leaves us to doubt. 
Cicero, in his fourth oration agamst Catiline, refers to Caesar's asser- 
tion without assent or dissent. The whole shows how little practical 
faith there was in the Hades of the poets. 



THE PAUSE IN HISTORY. I9I 

consolation in this pause between the death of the 
old religions and the incoming of the new ! Cicero 
has lost a lovely daughter, and his friend Sulpicius 
Sfeverus writes from Greece thinking to soothe the 
anguish of the father s heart. The letter has often 
been quoted, and its import is, — Why bemoan the 
death of a girl, when she and all of us, together with 
cities and empires, are passing down the throat of 
everlasting oblivion ? 

This affectation of comfort in despair, indicates 
the want which uttered itself louder and louder from 
minds whose sensibilities had not been quenched in 
the wide-spread sensuality, or where the human had 
not merged in the brute. Clemens, a noble Roman 
who lived about the time of the first diffusion of the 
Gospel, thus gives voice to these wants of the heart, 
this very orphanage of human nature. " I was from 
my early youth exercised with doubts which had 
^ found entrance to my soul I hardly knew how. Will 
my existence terminate at death ; and will no one 
hereafter be mindful of me, when infinite time sinks 
all human things in forgetfulness } It will be as well 
as if I had not been born. When was the world 
created and what existed before the world was 1 If 
it has always existed it will always continue to exist. 
If it had a beginning it will likewise have an end. 
And after the end of the world what will there be 
then 1 It may be the silence of death, or it may be 
something of which no conception can be formed. 



192 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

Incessantly haunted by such thoughts, which came I 
know not whence, I was sorely troubled so that I 
grew pale and emaciated, — and what was most ter- 
rible, whenever I strove to banish this anxiety ^s 
foolish, I only experienced the renewal of my suffer- 
ings in an aggravated degree. I resorted to the 
schools of the philosophers, hoping to find some cer- 
tain foundation on which I could repose ; and I saw 
nothing but the building up and pulling down of 
theories, nothing but endless dispute and contradic- 
tion ; sometimes, for example, the demonstration tri- 
umphed of the soul's immortality, then, again, that 
of its mortality. When the former prevailed I re- 
joiced ; when the latter, I was depressed. Then 
was I driven to and fro by the different repre- 
sentations ; and forced to conclude that things ap- 
pear not as they are in themselves but as they hap- 
pen to be presented on opposite sides. I was made 
more giddy than ever, and from the bottom of my 
heart sighed for deliverance." In this distress of 
mind Clement resolved to visit Egypt and hunt up a 
magician to summon a spirit from the other world, 
but some sensible philosopher dissuaded him. 

Such was the hunger of human nature in this 
solemn pause of history. The wide spread decay 
of the moral sentiment and the frightful corrup- 
tion of manners, were a necessary consequent of 
the paralysis of the spiritual faculties. The amuse- 
ments of Roman ladies were the cruelties of the 






THE' PAUSE IN HISTORY. 1 93 

amphitheatre, and the shrieks from rows of cruci- 
fied slaves fell on the iron ears of spectators with 
whom the throbs of pity were a childish weakness. 
If the moral sentiment found cheap utterance in 
poetry, or in moral codes, it was where the rights of 
humanity were trampled out without remorse. '' I 
am a man and anything pertaining to man concerns 
me," brought down the applause of a Roman theatre, 
where the day after the groans of the dying gladiator 
might have been applauded with equal glee. Ap- 
plauding noble sentiments in the theatre was the 
cheap commendation of virtues which only lived in 
history. A play of Atticus was brought out dur- 
ing the games, and some passages which expressed 
hatred of tyranny were loudly cheered. This was 
when the very spirit of liberty had departed and the 
gloom of despotism was thickening to its midnight ; 
and Cicero remarked that it gave him sorrow that 
the people employed their hands in clapping at a 
theatre instead of defending the Republic. Seneca 
could write charmingly in praise of poverty and 
self-sacrifice. " What have you done with the tons 
of gold piled up in your cellars t '' came back to him 
in the jeers of the multitude. 

Tacitus, who saw only the ruin and desolation, 
stands as one under a midnight sky, whose darkness 
has fallen as a continuous blot upon the landscapes. 
Human nature itself is in decay ; virtue has died 
out ; servility and rapacity are universal ; despotism 
13 



194 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

has become a necessity ; and he describes the face of 
things as if he were the last man who stood self-con- 
tained, wrapped in his mantle and surveying the 
ruins. " What is unknown/' he says, '' is thought 
grand and mighty ; but no longer is there any tribe 
beyond us ; nothing but waves and rocks, and Ro- 
mans fiercer than they, whose unrelenting cruelty 
you would vainly escape by obedience and good be- 
havior. Plunderers of the world, after the land fails 
from their ravage, they grope into the sea^ being 
greedy of his wealth if the enemy be rich, imbibing 
his servility if he be poor ; men whom neither East 
nor West can satiate. Alone of mankind they covet 
alike men s affluence and men's indigence. Theft, 
butchery, and robbery, they falsely name empire, and 
where they make a desert they call it peace." 

On such a field as this Jesus Christ appeared, 
some say the product of his times. He must have 
been the product of the times, very much as a Lap- 
land spring bursting from the bosom of an arctic 
winter, is the product of its ice and snow. Chris- 
tianity appears in the next century in the form of 
little communions called churches, emerging as a 
thousand glittering islets out of this sea of blackness, 
the islets enlarging their area till they touched each 
other ; very much as the geologists say Europe rose 
from the deep, first in spots of emerald that lay as 
scattered gems on a wilderness of waters, but which 
grew towards each other till they formed a great con- 
tinent clothed in luxuriant green. 



PART II. 

HISTORIC MEMORIALS. 



" We regard them as a child might regard the stars, as chance 
sparks of heavenly light, because we have not observed the law 
which rules their order. However far one evangelist might have 
been led by the laws of his own mind, it requires the introduction of 
a higher power that four should unconsciously combine to rear from 
different sides a harmonious and perfect fabric of Christian truth." — 
Westcott. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 

'TT^HE New Testament has four classes of writings 
-■- which we must carefully distinguish : the biog- 
raphy of Jesus ; the history of the churches founded 
on his life and word ; letters to those churches for- 
mulating the Christian doctrine ; and prophecy, which 
forecasts the final triumph of Christianity. Every 
one must see, however, that the biography contains 
the revelation. The history, the letters, and the 
vision of prophecy, are commentaries upon it, and il- 
lustrations of its divine power in its operation upon 
human nature. It is not necessary to suppose that 
the commentaries, however important, are final and 
exhaustive, or that its operation may not still be 
variant and progressive. Indeed, if the four Gospels 
embody a Divine Life, and the Divine Word made 
flesh, no exposition of their contents can be taken as 
final and exhaustive. 

The relation of these four remarkable biographies 
to each other, and especially of the first three to the 
fourth, is a subject which has been investigated with 
a thoroughness worthy of its exceeding interest. 



198 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

Before we speak of their connection we wish to say 
a few words of them separately.^ 

The order of time in which they were written, in 
the opinion of most critics is the order in which they 
stand in our Canon. Some place Mark first, but gen- 
erally both in the ancient canon and the modern, not 
only the four Gospels but all the books of the New 
Testament fall into the order as we have them, or 
nearly so, as if by some intuitive discernment of 
their pervading and organic unity.^ 

We place the date of the Gospels of Matthew and 
Mark not far from each other, and not much before 
the year 60. We place Luke's Gospel later, and not 
far from the year 65. These dates are not merely 
conjectural. We can see no reason, after the most 
searching criticism, for adopting any statement es- 
sentially different from that of Irenaeus (a. d. 170), 
which agrees in the main with that of Papias (a. d. 

1 It i» no part of our plan and purpose to exhibit at large the his- 
torical evidence for the synoptics. We give what we consider the 
fair results of investigation. For the process the reader who chooses 
may read Norton, Fisher, Tischendorf, and the popular work of 
Westcott on The Study of the Gospels^ and on the skeptical side 
Davidson's Introduction^ and the last Leben Jesu of Strauss. It will 
be seen, however, that to establish the genuineness of the fourth 
Gospel is to prove the genuineness of all the others, inasmuch as it 
supplements and so far indorses them. Lange's learned and ex- 
haustive work gives the matured results of investigation from the 
orthodox point of view. 

2 See this subject finely treated in Bernard's Progress of Doctrine ; 
Bampton Lectures^ pp. 231-236, note. 



THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY, 199 

116), and with Clement (a. d. 200), and with Origen 
(a. d. 225). John's Gospel must be placed in the 
last quarter, and probably in the last decade of the 
first century. All its contents confirm the state- 
ments of Irenaeus and Clement, that John wrote it at 
the solicitation of his friends to supply a growing 
want in the Church of a more full knowledge of the 
earlier life and miracles of Jesus, and of what per- 
tained less to the " body " and more to the spirit of 
his religion. 

That the original Matthew's Gospel was written 
in Hebrew, and that ours is a Greek translation of 
the same, is generally admitted in accordance with 
the early tradition, and with internal evidence in 
the Hebraisms which are found in it. Mr. Norton 
gives cogent reasons for believing that the first two 
chapters in the received version were no part of 
the original Hebrew Gospel, but were compiled 
from tradition, and given first as a preface to the 
Greek translation, to satisfy a natural craving of the 
reader for some knowledge of the birth and child- 
hood of Jesus, and that the preface found its way 
afterward to the body of the narrative, as it inevitably 
would do. The flight into Egypt and return seem 
inconsistent with Luke ; the intended return to Beth- 
lehem as if that were His home and not Nazareth, 
seems out of keeping with both Gospels. The whole 
cast of the narrative up to the third chapter, has not 
the usual traces of Matthew's pen, which, as we read 



200 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

him, has a rare gift for historical narration. We can- 
not agree, however, with Mr. Norton, that the preface, 
even though not Matthew's, is to be set aside as of no 
vakie. We think it has very great value, and has 
just the authenticity which such a preface, if made 
soon after, would be likely to possess. The miracu- 
lous conception and birth agree with Luke's history, 
and with what seems to have been the uniform belief 
among the personal disciples of Jesus while his 
mother was yet alive. The story of the Magians 
might have been a variation of that of the shep- 
herds mentioned by Luke, or it might have been 
real history ; for numerous instances might be cited 
to show that angelophanies were described under 
the image of a guiding star. The alleged murder 
of the children by Herod might have had some 
ground of fact. It was preserved long afterwards in 
the traditions and even the histories of his bloody 
reign, for a pagan writer of later date plainly refers 
to it in a passage in which it is manifest that the 
writer had not found his authority in the New Testa- 
ment but somewhere else.^ 

Assuming that Matthew's Gospel proper begins with 
the third chapter, and with the words, " In the days of 

1 The passage is from Macrobius, a writer whose date is not far 
from the close of the third century, and is as follows : " Cum audisset 
inter pueros quos in Syria Herodes, rex Judaeorum, intra bimatum 
jussit mlerfeci, filium quoque ejus occisum, ait : Melius est Herodis 
porcum esse, quam filium." — Saiurtialiay ii. 4. 



THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 201 

Herod appeared John the Baptist," ^ it proceeds with 
a unity and power swelling on to its close, unmatched 
in all literature for its simple majesty. We cannot 
understand the state of mind that genders such crit- 
icisms as those of Strauss and Schenkel. Nothing 
shall convince us that here is not an eye-witness of 
the events he describes, and an ear-witness of the dis- 
courses he reports ; whose mind has been lifted up 
and greatened by the subject-matter beyond all ordi- 
nary inspiration. It is the highest inspiration where 
the writer entirely disappears in his theme, and such 
a theme as this. We do not remember a personal 
allusion or the expression of a personal feeling of 
grief or admiration thrown in by the writer himself, 
as if such things were profane in the awful hush of 
emotion produced by his narrative. The discourses 
are often reported at length, and generally in their 
natural connection with the events that are grouped 
so as to synchronize with them. The opening ser- 
mon on the mount inaugurates formally the public 
ministry of Jesus as the multitudes thronged about 

1 The third chapter of our version opens : '* In those days came 
John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judaea." In what 
days ? The text just before relates to the infancy of Jesus. A writer 
like Matthew would hardly leap a chasm of thirty years in a single 
paragraph after that fashion. It ought to be said, however, that the 
Greek h Se tous rjfjLepais has in narrative more latitude of construction, 
and may only mean " in course of time." Supposing that Matthew 
compiled rather than composed the preface, and afterwards added it 
to his history, all difficulties would vanish. 



202 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

him throbbing and swaying with excitement, expect- 
ing the first summons of the wonder-worker to battle 
for his temporal kingdom, when the words, " Blessed 
are the poor in spirit" broke on the ears of his dis- 
ciples. The discourse that followed is plainly the 
report of an earwitness, and none of it could have 
been invented afterwards and put into the mouth of 
Jesus unless human wit had attainments then never 
reached before nor since. The hush of the soul be- 
comes more profound, as the narrative moves on, with 
almost insupportable grandeur towards the consum- 
mation. It is plain that the order of events is here 
preserved, for one scene leads on to another and pre- 
pares the way. Who that did not hear the sentence 
of doom pronounced upon the " Scribes and Phari- 
sees, hypocrites," in the last discourse of Jesus that 
rang through the temple courts, could ever have re- 
ported it as Matthew has done "i And who that did 
hear it and have those words burned into his memory 
would ever forget it 1 And who that did not hear the 
discourse that followed on the slopes of Olivet, where 
the scene opens up to the eternal judgment, could ever 
have imagined it .? And with what natural sequence 
do the scenes of Gethsemane, of the trial, and of Cal- 
vary hasten on ! " The fragmentary character of these 
narratives ! " If that means that they are fragments 
out of the whole life of Jesus, it is doubtless true, but 
we cannot imagine a work better arranged for unity 
of impression growing deeper to the end, producing 



THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY, 203 

without any art the efifect of the highest art, than we 
find in Matthew's Gospel. There is a point where 
human passion and emotion, having gained their 
height, go down again and give place to the noon-day 
stillness inspired by the divine presence. That state 
must have been gained by Matthew when he wrote 
his description of the crucifixion. All of fear and 
agony that can wring hurnan hearts he had experi- 
enced as an eye-witness of the scene ; he totally dis- 
appears from it in his narrative. To call his history 
dramatic would be borrowing the language of the 
stage. It is dramatic only as nature is in those 
awful moods when man seems as nothing before the 
on-goings of Omnipotence.^ 

The Gospel of Mark we regard as in fact the Gos- 
pel of Peter, bearing the impress of what may well 
be supposed to have been the features of his mind. 
Papias, Clement, and Origen are excellent authority 
for ascribing the second Gospel virtually to this 
Apostle. Papias knew and conversed familiarly with 
the personal followers of Jesus. " I made it a point," 

1 Mr. Norton rejects from Matthew's Gospel a passage in the de- 
scription of the crucifixion found in chap, xxvii., verses 52, 53, but 
without a shadow of external authority. " Many bodies of the saints 
that slept arose." If, as was certainly the case at and after the res- 
urrection of Christ and long after his ascension, the inner sight of his 
followers was touched, and opened, there would be appearances to 
them, not of Christ alone, but of some of his disciples lately deceased, 
not in their natural, but spiritual forms. In the darkened pneu- 
matology of the times they would inevitably have been reported as 
?* coming out of their graves." 



204 ^-^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. 

he says, " to inquire what was said by Andrew, Pe- 
ter, or PhiHp, what by Thomas, James, John, Matthew, 
or any other of the disciples of our Lord." He says 
he was informed by John the presbyter that Mark 
wrote as the interpreter of Peter ; and Clement says 
further that, being the companion of Peter, he was 
moved by the hearers of the latter to write out the 
substance of Peter's sermons, and leave them a mon- 
ument of the doctrine thus orally communicated. 
This agrees with the traditions of the Church so 
early, direct, and universal, that they. would not be 
mistaken, and it agrees with the contents of the 
second Gospel. Papias says, "Mark wrote with 
great accuracy," but not "in the order in which it 
was spoken and done by our Lord ; " and Clement 
says it had Peter's authority for being read in the 
churches.^ 

The second Gospel, then^ is a faithful report of 
Peter's historical discourses. Of course, the first 
preaching would be fundamentally historical. Mark 
wrote down the most striking and important things 
he had heard in Peter's narratives, and strung them 
together separately without any single continuous his- 
torical thread. This we conceive is sufficient to ac- 
count for the character of the book and for its abrupt 
close, without 'resorting to Mr. Norton's extraordinary 
and improbable hypothesis.^ For there can be no 

1 Eusebius, H. E.y ii. 15 ; iii. 39. 

2 Mr. Norton imagines that Peter might have been preaching dur- 



THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY, 205 

reasonable doubt, we think, that the best critics are 
right — among which are Norton and Tischendorf — 
in saying that the genuine Mark closes with the 
eighth verse of the sixteenth chapter, and that the 
following twelve verses are an appendix by some 
later hand. 

Conformably to this early history of the second 
Gospel we find it a series of most vivid historical 
pictures, such as none but an eye-witness ever could 
have given. It has no such majestic sweep and flow 
as we find in Matthew, and while it gives fragments 
only of the discourses, and those often out of place, 
it details matters of fact with minute and graphic 
delineation, but with no subordination of parts to one 
great idea. Little details are often thrown in found 
nowhere else, which could not possibly have come 
from imagination, but from reality alone. Peter's 
narrative — for so we have a right to call the second 
Gospel — has two characteristics which are quite 
peculiar. It gives us glimpses, which are sometimes 
exceedingly vivid, of the personal manner of Jesus and 
the expression of his countenance. Again, incidents 
are thrown in, very homely and almost unseemly in 
their nature, which others leave out, and which no 
romancer would ever have inserted ; for instance, the 
poor demoniac whom Jesus was to cure lay on the 
ground gnashing his teeth, and *' wallowed, foaming at 

ing the persecutions of Nero, and that Mark stopped short in his 
report when Peter was arrested. 



206 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

the mouth.'' The whole seventh chapter is intensely 
Petrine, both in its report of what Jesus said to the 
Pharisees and in the explanatory passage concerning 
their customs in baptizing, cups, benches, pots, and 
kettles.^ The second Gospel shows that the narrator 
had not the deepest spiritual insight of the mean- 
ing of his own story, but it gives us the most exter- 
nal life of our Saviour with every mark of downright 
and sturdy honesty. We say, with every chapter, 
these things were seen and heard on this earth, and 
are matters of fact, and not of imagination. 

Luke was not an eye-witness of what he relates, 
but his narrative is doubly interesting from his 
having been the companion of Paul. There was an 
early tradition that he was one of the seventy, which 
is confirmed by the fact that he alone has recorded 
their mission and work. There is evidence, too, that 
he had the confidence of John, and that he relates 
things upon John's authority. This evidence is so 
strong, that we shall consider portions of his history 
as substantially that of John. We will state the evi- 
dence and the reader can judge. 

I. No historian, of the rare qualifications which 
Luke certainly had, would be likely to undertake 
such a work as the third Gospel without availing him- 
self of the best sources which he could command. 
But there are portions of his narrative, as we shall 
see, where John certainly was the only eye-witness, 

1 ix. 20 ; vii. 1-23. 



THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 20/ 

and there are other portions where this was probably 
the case. It is tolerably certain that John had not 
left Palestine when the third Gospel was written, and 
we positively know that Paul met him at Jerusalem 
and found him a " pillar of the Church " very near 
the time when Luke became a companion of Paul.^ 
It is hardly conceivable that Luke should not have 
been brought into personal intercourse with the 
disciple who had the most intimate relations with 
Jesus. 

2. Luke in his preface, more than intimates that 
he wrote on the authority of eye-witnesses, and did 
not receive his facts at second hand. ^' Since many,'' 
he says, *'have undertaken to arrange a narrative 
of the events accomplished among us, cojiform- 
ably to the accounts given us by those who were eye- 
witnesses from the beginning, and have become min- 
isters of the Word, / have determined also, having 
accurately informed myself of all things from the 
beginning, to write a connected account that you 
may know the truth concerning the narrations which 
you have heard." ^ The conclusion is tolerably cer- 
tain that he wrote on the testimony of men who 
heard and saw. 

3. John heard and saw a great deal which the 
other writers did not. He was a disciple and in- 
timate friend of Jesus, as we shall see, for a year or 
more before the twelve had been chosen. He trav- 

1 Gal. ii. 9, 10. 2 Luke i. 1-4. 



208 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

elled with the Master, stayed with him at Nazareth, 
witnessed his miracles, went up with him to the Jew- 
ish festivals, and heard his conversations and parables, 
some time before Jesus took up his abode at Caper- 
naum. Any writer who undertook " accurately to 
inform himself of all things from the beginning" 
and report thereon, would be strangely incompetent 
if he did not resort to John, a living witness close at 
hand. 

4. Mary the mother of Jesus, was the adopted 
mother of John, and a member of his household from 
the day of the crucifixion. The main facts in the 
first chapter of Luke could come only from two 
possible sources : direct special revelation or the 
word of Mary. Luke's own statement precludes the 
former and necessitates the latter, and strongly im- 
plies his intercourse with John and his family. His 
entire introduction relative to the birth of Jesus and 
the Baptist has an air of historic certitude in details 
which Matthew's preface has not. The visit of Mary 
to Elizabeth, their conversation together with the 
whole subject-matter, are what women who had been 
mothers, and such mothers, would have fondly kept in 
memory and related afterward, but what would have 
originated in the head of no man to put into history. 
The chapter is intensely natural ; the angelophanies, 
under all the circumstances, are not unnatural or 
incredible ; and John in his introduction, gives the 
spiritual and divine side of the same series of facts 



THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 209 

as if complementing what Luke had already written. 
Moreover, Luke's account of the childhood of Jesus, 
including his dispute with the doctors in the temple 
and the search for him by his parents, could only have 
come from his mother. Mary might have been liv- 
ing when Luke wrote ; but whether so or not, John, 
adopted as her son under circumstances of bereave- 
ment unparalleled in any story of human sorrow, would 
be the person to whom she would have confided such 
facts as are detailed in Luke's first chapter ; and any 
writer must have been strangely remiss and^ careless 
if writing on such subjects he would not eagerly avail 
himself of such authority. 

5. Luke in portions of his narrative is intensely 
Johannean. Where he relates things in common 
with Matthew and Mark, there is a general indefinite- 
ness, and except towards the close a want of his- 
torical order. The great discourses are broken up, 
and striking passages from them combined and dis- 
tributed anew, and without any reference to the time 
and place of delivery. Important sayings are reported 
as being in " a certain place," or '* a certain village," or 
" one day," or " one of those days," or " one day as 
he was teaching." Things are inserted in the fore- 
part of his Gospel which belong to the latter part 
in the order of time.^ But in one kind of narrative 
Luke is unrivalled. Those parables which search 
the inner life most thoroughly and go to the deeper 

1 See chap. ix. 44, 5 1 . 
14 



2IO THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

hunger and thirst of the soul, are reported by Luke 
alone ; and some of them plainly, all of them pos- 
sibly, belong to that section of the ministry of Jesus 
which antedates the residence at Capernaum, but 
includes the sole discipleship of John and one or 
two others along with him. There are five of these 
parables preserved only by Luke : the Prodigal Son, 
the Unjust Steward, Dives and Lazarus, the Good 
Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Publican. They 
differ from the parables properly so-called and freely 
reported by Matthew, inasmuch as they are not 
drawn from the analogies of nature but from hu- 
man life, sometimes in its dearest and sweetest re- 
lations, and touch a tenderer chord of sympathy 
and love. They symbolize a more intimate relation 
between the heavenly Father and the human child, 
and they represent the universal brotherhood of the 
race. The beggar in Hades resting in Abraham's 
bosom ; the publican justified above the pharisee ; the 
man robbed and half murdered in the city of priests, 
to be cared for by the despised Samaritan, show un- 
mistakably the Saviour in conflict with Judaism in 
its own capital, where his ministry commenced with 
John and one or two others as his fellow disciples. 
They show Christianity thoroughly cleared of Juda- 
ism. These parables, where it is divinely embodied, 
could have come only through an eye and ear wit- 
ness, and they are most congenial with the spirit of 
John. 



THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 211 

6. There are events of which John of all the 
twelve was the sole spectator or presumptively so, 
and which Luke reports ; and though elsewhere he 
is often vague and fragmentary he is wonderfully dis- 
tinct and graphic here and has the scenic minute- 
ness of an eye-witness. We cite two of these in- 
stances ; one given by the other synoptics in more 
general terms, the other omitted altogether.^ Again, 
there are cases where Peter, James, and John were 
the only spectators and where Luke's narrative is 
much more graphic and detailed than that of the 
two other synoptics and, twice at least, lets us more 
interiorly into the spirit of the scene in the very 
style and method of the favorite disciple.^ 

The relation of the first two Gospels to the third 
and the first three to the fourth, becomes a subject 
of exceeding interest and importance. It has been 
the common method to study these four biographies 
as parallel. How much we may be confused and 
nonplussed by any such attempt, those who have 
used the "Harmonies" can bear witness. The 
Harmonies leave us with a painful impression of 
fragments jumbled together, but not joined. The 
truth is, these narratives are not parallel, and cannot 
be made to appear such, and yet taken together they 
have a unity which is not fortuitous but providential 
and vital. It is like the unity between the body and 

1 See Luke xxii. 63-71, and xxiii. 6-1 1, and 26-44. 

2 See Luke ix. 28-36, and xxii. 41-46. 



212 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

the soul that warms and inspires it. They are not 
parallel but introjacent, and the more we study them 
as such the more shall we see that organic complete- 
ness and correlation. One lies within another. We 
begin with the most external, — the sheer natural life 
of Jesus, — and we are carried successively to the 
heavenly and thence the divine heights of his being, 
Matthew and Mark dwell upon the ultimate facts, 
describe the outward life, the physical sufferings and 
death of Jesus. They do it with graphic power and 
more than Doric simplicity, as only an eye-witness 
could. It is true they do more than this. But the 
humanity of Jesus is put foremost and made in- 
tensely real, and the first two Gospels seldom tell us 
anything which an outside looker-on could not have 
reported.^ Luke, on the other hand, relates with 
much detail his supernatural conception and birth ; 
and he reports sayings of Christ without regard to 
chronological order, often with reference to some 
other series of doctrine or some other province of 
duty. And he gives us entire discourses and para- 
bles, as we have shown, which reflect the mind of 
Jesus in more spiritual hues, and the relation of all 
men to God in a more intimate and filial communion. 
But in the fourth Gospel we are carried up to the 
divine heights of the being of Jesus. We enter 
the " circle within the circles." Things are related 

1 The account of the temptation, and the agony in the garden, are 
exceptions, Matt. iv. i-ii, and xxvi. 39-45. 



THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 213 

which serve to complement what had gone before, 
supplying from the divine side of his being, that which 
gives congruity to the whole. It is not credible that 
a child should be brought into this world without 
any human father, and the statement of Matthew's 
preface or Luke's genealogy standing alone is be- 
yond the grasp of rational thought. John's Proem 
gives us, however, the same fact seen on the thither 
or divine side, and if one is true the other must in- 
evitably be. One is only the basis or earth-side of a 
transcendent divine reality which alone can glorify 
it, and make it a perfect living whole, only to take on 
the ghastliness of death by being picked in pieces. 

There is a wonderful Providence in the formation 
and development of the Christian canon of Scripture. 
What the nascent Church needed first of all things to 
know was the fundamental facts, the natural life, so to 
say, of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is what the ear- 
liest preachers would at first be at pains to present. 
Little else would then be likely to be understood. 
The Apostles would not begin the grand fabric of 
Christian doctrine at the top and build downward to 
the ground ; they would begin at the ground and 
build upward into the skies. Hence the striking 
verbal coincidence between Matthew and Mark, as if 
the Apostles had been accustomed to recite to their 
hearers over and over again the fundamental facts in 
the biography of Christ, until the very words had be- 
come stereotyped in their memories. The new con- 



214 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

verts, whether Jewish or heathen, would need at the 
start to be thoroughly possessed with that biography 
as exhibited to the senses, " what the eyes had seen 
and the hands handled of the Word of Life." How 
absolutely necessary this was is shown by the base- 
less and fantastic speculations of Gnosticism which 
soon followed, which ignored the natural life of Jesus 
altogether, and which would have made Christianity 
only a gorgeous and ever-shifting cloud-castle float- 
ing in air. That the Church should have begun with 
the fourth Gospel, and ended with the first, is not 
conceivable. That it should have begun with the 
first, and from its secure foundations been drawn up 
to the celestial and divine heights of the third and 
fourth, accords with the facts of the case and the 
nature of things. 

And it accords with our individual experience. 
We learn Christ after the flesh before we learn him 
spiritually and divinely. We must see him and 
know him on the side of his natural humanity, a 
partaker of our nature, a sharer of all pur woes and 
sufferings, or he will not touch our human sympa- 
thies and our tenderest love. But we are not likely 
to rest here. That it is not merely the carpenter s 
son who has found us and melted the flint from our 
hearts by such friendship and philanthropy, and such 
self-abnegation as the world had not known, we be- 
gin already to perceive, and when the fourth Gospel 
draws us upward to a vision of his unveiled divinity, 



THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 215 

and oneness with the Godhead, we are made con- 
scious of no incongruity in his Hfe and character, 
but rather of their majestic proportions and har- 
mony. 

How utterly futile the objection becomes, that the 
fourth Gospel omits things which are contained in 
the first and second, and contains very important 
matters which we miss in the others, must be obvious 
from these considerations. Why should John repeat 
what he knew the churches already possessed, un- 
less for the purpose of showing its relation to a 
higher series of truth and doctrine, which he some- 
times does ; or why should Matthew, or Peter through 
Mark his amanuensis, undertake to pour all the treas- 
ures of the new revelation upon minds just opening 
towards it out of Jewish formalism and heathen su- 
perstition } The objection too that each of the four 
Evangelists has his own peculiar style, and that the 
fourth Gospel throughout is chromatic with some 
mind and genius altogether foreign to the other three, 
not only is without validity, but suggests a most won- 
derful and- providential guidance. Each writer, of 
course, would select and give forth that in the life of 
the Master which was most in adaptation to his own 
mind and capacity to receive and reproduce, — and 
Peter of all others would be the man to set forth the 
ultimate facts and physical environment ; the life of 
Christ as addressed to the senses of men. Hence 
his Gospel has such an air of reality that Schenkel, 



2l6 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

who sees Christ only as a man of natural growth and 
development, receives only Mark as an authentic 
book, though the external evidence is not a whit 
stronger than that of the fourth Gospel. John of 
all others would be the man to set forth the inmost 
series both of fact and doctrine pertaining to the life 
of Jesus ; to describe the new temple of truth, not 
in its outer courts and granitic foundations, but in 
the holy of holies, where the glories of the Highest 
are without symbol and veil. 

The writer just referred to, in his attempted " por- 
traiture of Jesus," rejects the fourth Gospel as un- 
historic. In that shuddering dread of supernatural 
light which characterizes minds of his class, he rules 
out this book as the work of some fabricator of the 
second century tinged with the Gnostic theosophy. 
Only Mark is authentic. But the writer becomes 
conscious that his portraiture must be incomplete 
from Mark alone. He sees even from his point of 
view that here is a foundation whose superstructure 
towers into the tranquil heavens beyond the clouds 
that hide it, and quite beyond his view, .and he is 
compelled after all to resort to a book which he had 
rejected as unhistoric and spurious, in order to pre- 
sent the life he is depicting in its symmetrical and 
crowning perfections. He says of the writer of the 
fourth Gospel, '' He has elevated into the region of 
eternal thought, and invested with the transfiguring 
glory of a later century, a selection of reminiscences 



THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY. 21/ 

from the Christian traditions, taken out of the frame- 
work of their history in time. He has done this 
with an understanding of the interior being, and the 
loftiest aim of the hfe of Jesus, as it could not have 
been done at an earlier, and morally considered, nar- 
rower time. The fourth Gospel, therefore, serves as 
a really historical authority, for the representation of 
the moral being of Jesus, but in a high and spiritual 
sense of the word. Without this Gospel, the un- 
fathomable depth, the inaccessible height of the idea 
of the Saviour of the world, would be wanting to us, 
and his boundless influence, ever renewing our col- 
lective humanity, would ever remain a riddle. In 
the several particulars of his development, Jesus 
Christ was not what the fourth Evangelist paints 
him ; but he was that in the height and depth of 
his influence; he was not always that actualized, 
but he was that in truth. The first three Gospels 
have shown him to us still wrestling with earthly 
powers and forces. The fourth Gospel portrays the 
Saviour glorified in the victorious power of the spirit 
over his earthly nature. The former show us the 
son of Israel, struggling in his humanity up towards 
heaven ; the latter the King of Heaven, who de- 
scends full of grace from the throne of eternity into 
the world of men. Our portraiture of him must 
not disregard the natural, earthly foundation of the 
first three Gospels if it aims to be historically real ; 
but it can be an image of Jesus, eternally true only 



21 8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

in the heavenly splendor of the light which streams 
from the fourth Gospel." 

This writer will not believe that John, who leaned 
on the Saviour's breast, has described most perfectly 
" his interior being, and the loftiest aim of his life," 
but that some writer not yet released from heathen 
superstitions, living nearly a century afterward, has 
done this out of the legend and fable that came down 
to him. The Christ that changed the course of his- 
tory, and that moves the heart of the world in its 
profoundest deeps, is not the Christ as he lived and 
acted in Palestine, but as an unknown writer of the 
second century has produced him from unveracious 
traditions and from his own ideals ! 

This is the miracle we are to believe in order to 
void the miracles of the' New Testament. This un- 
designed and unconscious homage to the overwhelm- 
ing internal evidence of the fourth Gospel, and to its 
essentia] place in a seamless whole, is vastly signifi- 
cant. We shall be relieved of much needless diffi- 
culty when we are willing to think that an inter- 
working Providence had something to do in the 
canon of the New Testament, in the order of its for- 
mation, in the constitution and arrangement, espe- 
cially of these four wonderful biographies, and their 
growth into organic unity in such wise that each de- 
mands and complements the others ; one within an- 
other, like circles convergent towards an illuminated 
centre. 



THE FOUR GOSPELS IN ORGANIC UNITY, 219 

It is often said that the four Gospels do not con- 
tain any system of theology, and that Jesus never 
taught any. If this means only that he did not draw 
up a set of articles, it is certainly true. But. the sys- 
tem is there, too vast for us to make a model of for 
exhibition, and all the more impressing us with a 
sense of the divine order that reigns through it. 
,You might as well say that there is no system of 
nature, because the ocean-shores are not geomet- 
ric curves ; because the rivers are not canals ; or be- 
cause the constellations are not grouped in regular 
figures, which children can count off or copy in their 
diagrams. It is a fact exceedingly suggestive, that 
those who have attempted to make out a life of Christ 
and reduce him to our human proportions, sifting out 
everything which cannot be accounted for after the 
fashion of our common experience, or leaving out 
everything which cannot be defined in human creeds 
and propositions, make their readers painfully aware, 
if they do not become so themselves, that Christian- 
ity in its subtile and vital essence has eluded their 
analysis ; that the Christ of their books is one of 
their own invention. 



CHAPTER II. 

JESUS OF MATTHEW IS THE LOGOS OF JOHN. 

TV yj ATTHEW and Mark dwell primarily on the 
^^ ^ humanity of Jesus ; but his natural life is not 
described as unfolding under conditions which are 
merely normal. It is described as the ground and 
the ultimate manifestation of a life which is more 
than human. Not only in what Jesus teaches but in 
his manner of teaching this is always to be observed. 
He speaks with that tone of command and authority 
which, with men giving their natural intuitions or 
the deductions of their private reason, would be 
intolerably offensive. The sermon on the mount 
amazed his hearers, not so much on account of its 
subject-matter, as on account of his method and 
tone, for he appealed not to the law and the 
prophets for his proof-texts, as the scribes were 
wont to do, but made his utterance out of that 
original divine sovereignty whence law and prophets 
derive their authority. What to him were Moses 
or Solomon, — "a greater than Solomon is here." 
Mark dwells less than either of the synoptics on the 
proper divinity of Christ ; but all through his narra- 
tive there is an air and manner on the part of the 



JESUS OF MATTHEW THE LOGOS OF JOHN, 221 

subject of it which would be intolerable self-assump- 
tion for Moses or Solomon, or for any prophet or 
lawgiver, and which presuppose a divine epiphany 
in Jesus.^ We can cool down these passages by a 
process of criticism into figure and rhetoric, but the 
whole air and method will remain, and they are 
such as fit in with the natural coursings of no 
human biography before or since. 

But we come now to remark another of the bold- 
est characteristics of Matthew's Gospel. If we im- 
agine that because Matthew was concerned primarily 
with the humanity of Christ, he was forgetful of his 
divinity, and presents him to us as a fine specimen 
of the best culture of his times, we shall not read 
far before we find our imagination melting away. 
Not merely Jesus but the Christ — the Christ of au- 
thority from above — is presented with a sharpness 
and boldness made more uncompromising by the in- 
tense realism of the first Gospel. Many illustrations 
of this fact are crowding upon us, but we will select 
only three. 

I. The doctrine of John's Proem is explicitly as- 
serted in Matt. xi. 27. After rebuking the cities 
where his Word had been delivered and his works had 
been done, Jesus tells them that their guilt in reject- 
ing him was greater than the guilt of Sodom, and 
that it would be more tolerable for Sodom in the day of 

1 Read, for instance, Mark i. 7-1 1 ; ii. 10, 28 ; viii. 38 ; xii. 35-37 ; 
1^1 xiii. 26, 27 ; xiv. 62 ; xv. 2. 



222 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

judgment. Then falling into a strain of indescribable 
tenderness, he subjoins : " All things are delivered 
unto me of my Father, and no man knoweth the Son 
but the Father, neither knoweth any man the 
Father, save the Son, and He to whomsoever 
THE Son will reveal Him. Come unto me all ye 
that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you 
rest." It has been asserted that the Logos-doctrine 
is peculiar to John. We find it not so, but only its 
metaphysical form of statement. It is set forth here 
in Matthew, with a clearness which no human Ian- . 
guage can improve upon, coupled with invitations 
out of the very heart of the Divine mercy which no 
fabricator would invent or imagine. 

2. Christ, as the judge of men, is unquestionably 
the burden of the fourth Gospel. But if found in 
John asserted in more metaphysical language, it is 
found in Matthew drawn out with more than dra- 
matic power, and with a sublimity unsurpassed any- 
where in the New Testament. And it is not found 
in Matthew as exceptional as if some interpolater had 
put it in. It is found at the conclusion of the dis- 
course from the heights of Olivet, when, as the 
doomed city lay at his feet, the vast future opened to 
the eye of Jesus, even to the retributions of an eter- 
nal world. The discourse rises in grandeur to the 
final announcement, "When the Son of Man shall 
come in his glory and all the holy angels with him, 
then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory. And 



JESUS OF MA TTHEW THE LOGOS OF JOHN, 223 

before him shall be gathered all nations, and he 
shall separate them one from another as a shepherd 
divideth his sheep from the goats/' There is no 
such passage as this in the fourth Gospel. The same 
doctrine is variously asserted. The incarnate Word 
is to be the Judge of men. "All who are in the 
graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth." 
But it is stated in a more colloquial and supplemen- 
tary way, and is no more than a commentary on the 
grand and sustained utterance from Mount Olivet 
reported in the first Gospel. 

3. But there is another passage, if possible still 
more significant, in the first Gospel, asserting the 
Divinity of Christ with a power to which neither 
John nor any other writer has given any additional 
strength. It is the final charge of Jesus to his dis- 
ciples, involving the formula of baptism. It was given 
as Matthew reports, at the last post-resurrection ap- 
pearance of Jesus to his disciples. "All power is 
given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye there- 
fore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the 
name of the Father and the Son and the Holy 
Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatso- 
ever I have commanded you : and lo ! I am with you 
alway, even to the end of time." (rov atwi/os.) 

The passages we have cited are not exceptional in 
Matthew's Gospel, but with others of similar import 
they connect themselves organically with the whole 
narrative. The fact then stands thus : that the first 



224 '^^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. 

Gospel dwells primarily on the humanity of Jesus, for 
it comes first in the order of time. The whole doc- 
trine of the incarnation is baseless without it, and 
would only be a Gnostic theosophy floating in air. 
But Matthew, in consequence of those very qualities 
of his mind and style which give his narrative this 
intense and uncompromising realism, has also made 
the Divinity of Christ stand out with corresponding 
distinctness of outline. John writes thirty years 
afterwards with the synoptics before him, professedly 
to complete them. He does complete them, not un- 
dertaking to lay the foundations anew, but telling us 
a great deal about the Divinity of Christ, which ex- 
plains, illustrates, and enlarges what the others had 
reported, showing the sublime peaks of doctrine 
which they had left in rugged outline, bathed in a 
sweeter and softer splendor from the morning sky. 

If the reader, however, is in any doubt as to 
whether the Jesus of the first Gospel is the Christ 
of the fourth, if he thinks the first may be a man de- 
veloped like other men out of the culture of his times, 
while the other was the factitious invention of a later 
day, he can easily bring this matter to the test. 
Summon the best man you can find, the most ad- 
vanced prophet of to-day, and let him stand in the 
position of this same Jesus, the mere majt of the first 
Gospel. Let him see if he can grasp his thunders. 
Let some prophet of to-day who ought to have grown 
up to the stature of Jesus, — the mere human devel- 



JESUS OF MATTHEW THE LOGOS OF JOHN, 225 

opment, declare in the face of the world that no 
man knoweth the Father but himself, and those to 
whom he shall reveal him ; let him assume to sit 
on a throne of glory with all the holy angels 
around him, and part the nations to the right hand 
and the left, to everlasting punishment or to life eter- 
nal ; let him announce that all power is given to him 
both in heaven and earth ; let him put his own name 
into a formula of baptism, and charge his followers to 
make disciples, in the name of the Father and the 
Holy Ghost, and — himself. Would the world be con- 
verted by such preaching at the rate of three thou- 
sand in a day ; or would they regard it as self-conceit 
and self-assertion, passed into the stage of monoma- 
nia, and fit only for an asylum for the insane ? 
15 



CHAPTER III. 

THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH. 

T) IRTH, from any view we can take of it, is a pro- 
-■-^ found mystery. There are two kinds. There 
is the birth of species, or ascent from a lower plane 
to a higher one ; and there is the propagation of the 
same species successively on the same plane of ex- 
istence. In the former, the Divine power operates 
immediately through the matrices of nature ; in the 
latter, through finite parentage. That any new spe- 
cies or new style of life was started mechanically by 
the Creator, or " made out of nothing," not only 
shocks the reason, but lacks all confirmation in 
any known facts of natural history. Theology is 
strangely fearful lest the Darwinian hypothesis of 
development should sink us in atheism. Should it 
ever be verified it would only be to write out a chap- 
ter of a new book of Genesis, wonderfully confirming 
the old one, showing in succession the birth of spe- 
cies, and the ascent through six days of creation till 
man appeared upon the earth. 

Nature only afibrds matrices for the all-fructifying 
spirit. If we attempt to trace to its beginning a new 
type of life we find, of necessity, that it abuts upon 



THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH, 



227 



something both higher and lower than itself. On the 
natural side it has been produced from something 
lower ; animal life, for instance, has been evolved 
from vegetable. But to suppose that the vegetable 
kingdom moMuted up of itself into the animal, would 
be to shock the reason more violently than the most 
mechanical and potter-like theology has ever done. 
The same is to be said of the assumption that ani- 
mals climbed up into manhood, the monkeys rubbing 
off their tails, and otherwise improving their condition, 
till they found themselves spiritual beings possessing 
immortal souls. But the idea that the human species 
at its origin abuts upon something both higher and 
lower than itself, seems almost a necessity of the 
reason ; upon the matrices of a lower life in its se- 
lectest forms on the natural side, and on the paternal 
side on nothing less than the brooding Spirit of God. 
Development from lower to higher species is not self- 
evolution. Every creation of a new type of being is 
a conception and a birth, having only nature on the 
maternal side, and the immanent Deity on the pa- 
ternal necessitating no finite fatherhood between. 
Suppose, then, it should turn out as one of the 
discoveries of natural science that man was not 
manufactured de novo by direct interposition of God, 
but that there is a vast system of evolution climbing 
upward, from the nebula to the mineral, from the 
mineral to the plant, from the plant to the animal, 
and from the animal to man, — the glorious flower of 



228 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

the whole opening upward into the Hght of immor- 
tality, for whom everything beneath serves only as 
root and stem, I can conceive of nothing more wor- 
thy of the Divine wisdom and omnipotence. And 
that wisdom is none the less adorable that its creation 
rises not through breaks and divisions where we can 
insert our dissecting knives, but in unfolding grace 
and order as the seed rises up into the palm tree, 
and then flowers forth towards the sunbeams. 

Every new type of life draws up into itself the next 
lower one, including that and — something more. 
The mineral is not the nebula, but it takes the neb- 
ula into its organic structure ; the plant is not the 
mineral, but it draws up the mineral into its compo- 
sition ; the animal is not a vegetable, but he takes up 
the vegetable, and decomposes it in a higher vitality ; 
man is not an animal, but he must take up and in- 
clude the animal as the basis and background of 
spiritual existence. Each includes what is below it 
and something more, and that something more comes 
from above nature, unless the stream can mount 
higher than its source, and unless all our talk about 
the nexus of cause and effect is without meaning. 
And if it be true that man was not extemporized by 
his Creator, but that a million years were employed 
in making him, we do not see that the workmanship 
is any the less wonderful and superb on that account, 
for what are a million years but as the tick of a watch 
in the eternity of Gqd } 



THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH. 229 

Climbing up from these analogies we are ready to 
say that if a higher type of life than the human, in- 
cluding that and something more, is to be produced 
upon this earth, it will not probably descend exter- 
nally out of heaven, and stand among us in its insu- 
lation. Neither again will it be manufactured. It 
will be born. And it will be born of the brooding 
Spirit of God on the paternal side and of our human 
nature on the maternal, with no finite fatherhood in- 
tervening, and the product of such conception and 
birth would be a style of Divine Life into which 
men do not develop by natural progress and self- 
improvement, but which would express to them more 
completely and openly the moral perfections and glo- 
ries of the Godhead. 

This is precisely what three of the New Testament 
writers affirm respecting the birth of Jesus Christ. 
Two of them affirm it mainly from the natural or 
maternal side, one of them from the supernatural and 
divine. It is easy to do this. Other writers had 
done like things before, putting in the claim of super- 
natural parentage and birth for the heroes of their 
narratives. But they do it at their peril. The prog- 
ress and the ending of such a life must answer to its 
beginning, and be congenerous with it. He who puts 
up such a porch as this imposes upon himself the 
task of making the building correspond to it. If he 
resorts to invention and imagination at the begin- 
ning, so he must in the progress and the ending, and 



230 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

he is perfectly sure to overwhelm himself with confu- 
sion and disgrace. For a man can no more imagine 
and depict out of his own subjective state a style of 
life organically above it and divinely human than he 
could himself beget it or create it. To say that he 
could pre-determine and describe the hero of such a 
narrative, would be saying that he was himself the 
hero, or else that he occupied the same plane of 
existence with him. An elephant or a monkey could 
have just as easily imagined what was to be the style 
of human life before man existed on the earth. And 
so we find that before the birth of Jesus Christ all 
the stories of heroes with pretended superhuman 
birth and origin make their lives and characters 
more decidedly sub-human than those of common 
men. The very effort to make them more than hu- 
man, or more than natural, renders them all the more 
inhuman, unnatural, fantastic, and absurd. 

The commingling of the two streams of life, mater- 
nal and paternal, and the divine life within them both, 
is one of the inscrutable mysteries. The laws which 
govern it are as yet very imperfectly understood. The 
paternal life is wrapped within the maternal, the lat- 
ter — the maternal — prevailing through the years of 
infancy and on into childhood, and serving to weave 
the garments of flesh and blood and the exterior 
qualities of mind and soul ; all, in fine, that goes to 
make up the external man. The maternal life is 
sometimes vigorous and dominating to such an ex- 



THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH, 23 1 

tent that the paternal never appears externally, or, if 
at all, only feebly and dimly. It is held within the 
other, and held in abeyance. Unless, however, it is 
dominated in this way, it appears, though later than 
the other ; the paternal qualities coming forth with 
greater and greater fullness, while the maternal re- 
tire before them, and sometimes disappear altogether, 
having served as the scaffolding of the intellectual 
and spiritual man. Hence we often find that while 
the resemblance to the mother at first is very great, 
in mind, feature, and disposition, it grows less and 
less with increasing years, while the features and the 
mind and passions of forefathers, sometimes for gen- 
erations back, break through and become envisaged 
in all their strength and brightness. Our paternal 
humanity is within our maternal, sometimes never 
invading the consciousness or shaping our exteriors 
till infancy and childhood have had their day, but 
nevertheless prevailing in the end, and descending 
through lines of ancestry for hundreds of years. 

Within our entire humanity, deeper than all its 
wrappages and layers, is the immanent Deity himself. 
But He never invades our consciousness as God. He 
never is within us as any part of our proper selves. 
Behind and within our voluntary powers He is the 
inspiring energy on which we ever draw, and out of 
which we breathe the breath of life ; but the limit of 
our self-consciousness is precisely the limit where 
humanity ends. When his life becomes our life it is 



232 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

no longer Divine but human, and within the reach 
of our voluntary agency, to give back to Him in self- 
renouncing service, or pervert to selfish and ignoble 
ends. 

Supposing it possible, however, for a being to be 
born into our earthly degree of existence with a finite 
maternal humanity on one side and the Divine Spirit 
on the other, with no finite fatherhood between, then 
it is conceivable that as the maternal humanity waned 
and the paternal dawned and brightened through the 
consciousness, it would image forth to us the Divine 
perfections on a loftier plane of existence than man 
and nature had ever done. Such a person would not 
speak and teach and act merely from a finite and fal- 
lible intelligence, but as the inmost Divine waxed and 
the outward and finite waned, he would speak and teach 
and act from the Divine reason itself Such would 
not be a case of mere prophetic inspiration which is 
temporary and vanishing, but of Divine incarnation, 
in which the voice of the Divine Reason is the 
normal dictate of the soul. It would not be right to 
say that such a being is God, if you mean that God is 
limited to any outward symbolization, but it would be 
true that the finite maternal humanity, waning and 
disappearing, God would be revealed to us in a higher 
degree of life, and in more perfect and unclouded 
glory than inanimate nature or sinful men could ever 
reveal Him. And though what is called "the hypo- 
static union " is beyond our comprehension and anal- 



THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH. 233 

ysis, so also is any union of the infinite with finite 
natures. In man God is one degree nearer to us than 
in the animal, but in a Divine Humanity he would 
be nearer still, and with a personality more openly 
brought to view. In a person divinely human there 
would be nothing unnatural, but something more than 
natural ; there would be nature transfigured and ex- 
alted. There would be nothing inhuman, but some- 
thing more than human ; humanity made divine, and 
therefore the most clear and spotless mirror through 
which the divine attributes shine forth upon the 
world. We can conceive that there might be a ne- 
cessity in the course of human advancement for such 
a revelation of the Divine Perfections ; that sinful 
men, however developed, are no adequate representa- 
tives of God ; that there was an appropriate time for 
some knowledge of Him above the light of nature, 
above depraved human instincts, above legal codes 
and verbal declarations ; that these instincts them- 
selves might have been yearning forward in expecta- 
tion of a nearer divine epiphany, as when men watch 
the reddening streaks of twilight ; until God should 
appear as a new sunrise, to light up the dark annals 
of the earth with diviner glow. 

We are assuming nothing here. We are only de- 
scribing the rational possibilities and probabilities of 
the case. Men might find God partially in nature 
and in themselves, for He is immanent in both, but 
in such a divine epiphany He would be revealed in 



234 ^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL, 

a higher degree of life and illustrate both nature 
and man more perfectly from the divine side of all 
created things. By the immanence of God, in us, 
we might surely recognize such an advent of the 
Lord when it takes place. But we should not be 
likely to master its psychology, since we know it 
so little in the lower degrees .of life, where infinite 
and finite interpenetrate in nature and in ourselves. 

vs. 

We have three narratives which describe the birth 
of Jesus Christ, those of Matthew, Luke, and John. 
The first, describe the human, the last the divine side 
of this one event, from which a long and marvelous 
history was to take its rise. Matthew, or whoever 
wrote his preface, says He was born of Mary, a Jew- 
ish virgin, and was begotten of the Holy Ghost with- 
out any intervening human paternity ; and he shows 
the lineage of Joseph, afterwards her husband, in its 
descent through David from Abraham, the father of 
the Jewish nation. Mary's line, though not traced, 
runs into that of Joseph, as she belonged probably to 
the same tribe ; so that although Jesus had no human 
father, yet on the side of his maternal humanity he 
would inherit the proclivities of the Jewish race from 
Abraham downward. Luke also gives the birth of 
Christ without any human or finite fatherhood, trac- 
ing the line inversely from Joseph to Abraham and 
beyond him to Adam, the son of God, Both these 
genealogies were probably copied from public records. 
The names in the two genealogies do not coincide, 



THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH, 



235 



and much criticism has been brought to bear upon 
the supposed discrepancy. But there is no discrep- 
ancy that can be discovered. These names do not 
stand for individuals merely, but many of them for 
houses or families through a long lineage, the head 
of the line being preserved where it runs into 
another line, several intervening links being left 
out. Jewish genealogies were recorded in this 
way. Thus Matthew says, ^ Joram begat Ozias. 
But Joram was not the father of Ozias, but his an- 
cestor removed four degrees from him, as any one 
will see by tracing the genealogy in the books of 
Kings and Chronicles. Three links are there re- 
corded which Matthew leaves out. All that can be 
said is, the missing links of Luke's genealogy do not 
synchronize with the missing links of Matthew's. 
There might have been reasons which do not appear 
on the surface. The only reason for giving the gen- 
ealogy at all was to represent the qualities in its 
several degrees upward of the humanity inherited 
and impersonated in Jesus Christ. So, too, the ob- 
jection that Mary's genealogy, not Joseph's, ought 
rather to have been given, has no validity. Men, not 
women, represented tribes and lines of descent, and 
Joseph's name probably stood in the tribe to which 
Mary belonged and through which came all the an- 
cestral blood that coursed through her veins. 

Matthew's account, as we have said, has been chal- 

1 Chap. i. 8. 



236 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

lenged as no part of the genuine first Gospel. But 
the genuineness of Luke's narrative is unquestioned. 
The most fastidious criticism does not attempt to 
mutilate the record. Still its story of the conception 
and birth of Christ is called " legendary " by easy 
assumption on the part of that class of writers who 
arbitrarily sift the record till the residuum leaves only 
a man of natural birth and endowment. We show 
elsewhere, as we think, excellent reasons for regard- 
ing Luke's account as coming direct from the lips of 
Mary, or at most with only one intervening witness, 
that of John her adopted son. John's testimony is 
at one with that of Matthew and Luke, and only 
rounds and complements it. His record assuredly 
of the birth of Jesus interpenetrates their's from the 
divine side of things. They had described from the 
earthly side and from Mary's point of view, the ma- 
ternal humanity with all its inheritance of Jewish 
proclivities, and of human proclivities from Adam 
down. John supplements them by saying that the 
Word, which was Iv dpKrj with God, and in its first 
principle divine, descending into this world to sub- 
due and save it, took this humanity for its cloth- 
ing and was the soul of its soul and the Hfe of its 
Ufe. 

Legendary ! A legend is a cumulative accretion ot 
hearsays around a nucleus of common fact, clothing 
it in the garb of fable ; and the common fact here 
was the birth of Jesus Christ, the son of Joseph and 



THE MYSTERY OF BIRTH, 



237 



Mary. Legendary ! the story might appear so, if 
you isolate it and make it stand alone. But why do 
you isolate it } Read on, and at the farther end of 
the biography we come to the death of this person 
quite as exceptional as his birth. The flesh thus as- 
sumed as the investiture of a divine life did not 
become a corpse, like the bodies of other men to see 
corruption in the grave. It was extruded by a living 
process, through the abounding energy within, where 
the divine man it had served ascended to his place 
on high. If you make his ingress into this world as 
. here given legendary, why not reduce his egress from 
it into the same category 1 If you shut the divine 
portal through which He came in, why not also the 
divine portal through which He went out t Then 
just sit down and scan the facts that lie between and 
see what can be made of them. The life between 
constantly forecasts just that exit from this world ; it 
courses its way on planes of being far above those 
on which we walk, and subsumes just such a birth 
and death. You must run the legendary theory 
through that also, till all the history is disorganized 
and tumbles into chaos. And even then you have 
only just begun. This life of Christ on earth was 
preliminary and preparatory to a deeper and broader 
life in humanity, coursing through the history of 
eighteen hundred years. The record goes on to say 
that he appeared after his resurrection as the guar- 
dian of those communions called churches, and that 



238 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

the Holy Ghost through him "fell on them " and gave 
them their conquering power. The Christian Church 
ever since, conscious of his presence and inworking 
divine energy, has originated, led on, and inspired all 
the advanced civilizations of the world, and is lead- 
ing them still. Legendary ! Why not make all the 
after-history legendary too, and the world's progress 
starting from fiction and always proceeding under it ! 
This life, dating from that birth at Bethlehem, has 
continued ever since, and it spans our lowly history 
and floods it with more than rainbow glories, one 
foot of its celestial arc resting at the manger where 
Mary lay, and the other on in the future, for aught 
we can tell at the end of time. Legendary ! Is it 
necessary to abstract such a birth from its relations 
and reduce it to the conditions of our own baby- 
hood .? 1 

1 See the Appendix B, on the Birth of Christ. 



CHAPTER IV. 

NAZARETH. 

WE have only one chapter in the childhood of 
Jesus, and that is Nazareth. This, however, 
is an exceedingly important one, and better probably 
than any accounts which his mother or his teachers 
would have given us of his education. The only 
written statement which we have respecting his child- 
hood is given by Luke, and seems to have come 
from Mary his mother, perhaps through John who 
became her foster-son. ^It is exceedingly general ; 
and after relating the journey to Jerusalem and his 
staying behind to converse with the doctors of the 
law, we are told that He returned to Nazareth, was 
subject to Joseph and Mary, and that while he grew 
in wisdom and stature he grew also in those divine 
affections which won the favor of God and man. 
That Mary had much more to relate respecting 
the childhood of Jesus is an unavoidable inference 
from our knowledge of the instincts of maternal 
love ; that the evangelists have treated it with a 
most severe reticence shows how providentially they 
were guided. They might have gratified our cu- 
riosity ; but it is not likely the childhood of Jesus 



240 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

differed greatly from that of other children ; and 
probably Luke tells us about all that is to be said 
when he implies this increasing grace of person and 
behavior with the increasing wisdom that shone 
through it. 

But all about Nazareth lay the open book which He 
read, and it lies there yet. Paul went up from Tar- 
sus to Jerusalem and studied Jewish lore at the feet 
of Gamaliel, in the most famous theological school of 
his times ; and his writings bristle all through with 
Jewish terminologies. Jesus was soon to have the 
thick-coming thoughts, for which no human school 
could furnish adequate language, but only the types 
and images in the infinite treasuries of nature. 

Nazareth, though a despised country town, was of 
all places the most propitious for an education of this 
kind. It lies in a small basin of northern Palestine 
imbosomed in hills. The basin extends about a mile 
from west to east, and about half as far at its greatest 
width from north to south, narrowing toward the east 
into a deep ravine, giving the basin the shape of a 
pear with a long stem. This ravine leads out into 
the noble plain of Esdraelon, which spreads out so 
far below that a transparent mantle of sky-blue is 
resting upon it. The hill at the west end of the 
basin rises abrupt and precipitous ; along the north- 
ern side the ridge is depressed somewhat, and along 
the south and east it sinks still lower. The town 
itself lies at the western extremity of this basin. 



3 

4 



NAZARETH. 24I 

cowering under the bluffs or clinging to their feet and 
sides. It has three thousand inhabitants, about the 
same number probably as in the days of Joseph and 
Mary, and presenting a similar external appearance 
of low houses with flat roofs, looking like cubes of 
stone. As you enter the basin through the narrow 
opening on the east and come into the town, you are 
greeted at this day with a more friendly welcome 
even from the Jewish population than is usual in Pal- 
estine. A fountain, whose waters percolate through 
the veins of the western hills, is conducted into one 
of the streets of the village, and falls into a stone 
reservoir. Over the fountain itself stands now a 
Christian church consecrated to the Virgin, because 
monkish legends will have it that her house was near 
by. With more probability and with tolerable cer- 
tainty, they might say that here she was wont to come, 
with the other women of the city, bearing their 
pitchers on their heads. You would see at this day 
a crowd of women around the reservoir each waiting 
for her turn, and you would notice among them a 
peculiar native beauty after the Syrian type, and a 
peculiar gracefulness and friendliness of manners, 
partly owing to the buoyant health they breathe in 
among the mountains. 

But as you ascend '' the brow of the hill whereon 

their city is built," and which in one place breaks off 

in a perpendicular wall forty or fifty feet in height ; 

as you gain the summit of the ridge that curves 

16 



242 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

round it on the west like a protecting arm, a most 
enchanting panorama is unrolled suddenly to your 
view, every fold in it being a rich historic page. On 
the west stretches the long line of Carmel, beginning 
far away south towards Samaria, but extending north- 
westward to where he seems to plunge suddenly into 
the sea. This ridge is not bald like some of the 
mountains of Judaea, but crowned with forest, over 
whose depressions the Mediterranean gleams here 
and there in silver curves. All the history of Elijah, 
the Tishbite, is given back to your memory as you 
gaze, up to the time when he disappeared in his 
chariot of fire. Look northward and the scene va- 
ries. Near by stretches one of the most beautiful 
plains of northern Palestine, watered by a stream 
which divides it like a glittering thread on its way 
to the Kishon, where Elijah slew the false prophets. 
Beyond this plain northward the ridges rise one be- 
yond another like ascending stairs, each taking on 
a deeper tinge of blue. The mountains of Safed, 
twenty miles away, overtop all between, and there, 
lifted up into the sky, you see the place itself, " a city 
set upon a hill." But Safed is backed by still higher 
ridges, and they roll in ascending billows sixty miles 
away up to Mount Hermon himself, who looks down 
on the whole in cold and scornful majesty from under 
his crown of snow. 

If you turn towards the east and southeast, another 
plain, the magnificent plain of Esdraelon, spreads out 



NAZARETH, 243 

its long level floors of green, under their mantle of 
sky-color, sprinkled more sparsely with signs of pop- 
ulation, with valleys winding like dissolving views 
among the hills. Out of this plain rises Tabor, 
rounded like a hemisphere, little Hermon, and Gil- 
boa, where " the shield of Saul was vilely cast away ; " 
and through a depression north of Tabor you look 
into the valley of the Jordan, and over the high 
plains away beyond to the hills of Peraea which 
shade off into the Orient. South towards Jerusalem 
rises a spur of the ridge of Carmel, and over it loom 
up Ebal and Gerizim, from which the curses and the 
blessings answered to each other. Nearer by, and 
forming the heart of Palestine, spreads out the vast 
plain of Esdraelon with its gentle undulations ; 
fields covered over with corn, interminable flocks and 
herds ranging in luxuriant pastures ; — the granary 
of the surrounding country, rich in natural produc- 
tions and voluptuous beauty ; rich, too, in historic 
memories, as the scene over which the most decisive 
battles had rolled back and forth. Such is the hori- 
zon of Nazareth, more crowded with life and in- 
dustry when Joseph and Mary lived there, but whose 
paradisical enchantments have not yet faded out. To 
know all its loveliness and magnificence you should 
see it in the morning as the sky reddens beyond the 
hills of Peraea, till the sun crimsons the snows of 
Hermon and then lights up peak after peak below 
him as with a torch ; or you should see it at even- 



244 ^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL, 

tide, as the sun drops behind Carmel and dissolves in 
the sea, turning Kishon and its affluents into burn- 
ing threads, turning the vapors of the Mediterranean 
into new " chariots of fire and horses of fire " for other 
ascending Ehjahs, and thence diffusing over the broad 
panorama of the GaUlean hills and valleys a purpling 
softness like the more tender and brooding mercy of 
the Lord. 

And why do we open these beautiful pages ? Be- 
cause it is certain they were the study of Jesus for 
thirty years ; because the infinite Word that was al- 
ready dawning through his higher consciousness was 
here to find its language. This vast treasury of type 
and imagery was to be drawn up into discourse and 
parable, as the embodiment of truths for which no 
language of books could furnish an appropriate set- 
ting. Not only nature in all her lights and shadows, 
but human life in all its busy ongoings, was out- 
spread within the horizon of Nazareth. The keepers 
of vineyards pruning their vines ; the shepherds 
leading their flocks a-field ; the husbandmen sowing 
their grain ; the plains over which the breezes as 
they swept made waves in the fields of wheat and 
tare ; the reapers at their work over the vast surfaces 
of Esdraelon and El Battauf; the prognostics of 
storm coming up from the sea, or of fair weather 
when the sky at evening reddens over the ridges of 
Carmel ; the Light of the World coming out of the 
east to enlighten every man ; — all these and much 



NAZARETH. 245 

more were daily in sight over that " brow of the 
hill " whereon the city of Nazareth was built. Two 
processes were going on in preparing the Christ for 
his work, — one of Spirit and one of sense. Higher 
truth than men had received or known was coming 
down through the heaven of his mind ; better and 
more universal types were drawn up from earth 
through the senses to meet it and body it forth. 
The Son of God was also the son of Mary ; the Word 
was made flesh to find a dwelling-place in the midst 
of men.^ 

1 Renan's description of the scenery of Palestine is picturesque, 
though distinctness of feature is often sacrificed for brilliancy. Rob- 
inson is both picturesque and exact as line and compass. After an 
excellent description of the horizon of Nazareth he thus indicates the 
associations of the place, looking from the plateau above the town : 
*' Seating myself in the shade of the Wely, I remained for some hours 
upon this spot, lost in the contemplation of the wide prospect, and 
of the events connected with the scenes around. In the village be- 
low the Saviour of the world had passed his childhood ; and although 
we have few particulars of his life during those early years, yet there 
are certain features of nature that meet our eyes now, just as they 
once met his. He must often have visited the fountain near which we 
had pitched our tent ; his feet must frequently have wandered over 
the adjacent hills, and his eyes doubtless gazed upon the splendid 
prospect from this very spot. Here the Prince of Peace looked down 
upon the great plain, where the din of battles so often had rolled, and 
the garments of the warrior been dyed in blood ; and He looked out, 
too, upon that sea over which the swift ships were to bear the tidings 
of his salvation to nations and to continents then unknown. How 
has the moral aspect of things been changed ! Battles and blood- 
shed have indeed not ceased to desolate this unhappy country, and 



246 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

gross darkness now covers the people ; but from this region a light 
went forth which has enlightened the world and unveiled new climes ; 
and now the rays of that light begin to be reflected back from dis- 
tant isles and continents, to illuminate anew the darkened land, 
where it first sprung up." — Researches ^ vol. iii. pp. 190, 191. 



I 



i" i 



CHAPTER V. 

THE FORERUNNER. 

nr^HERE was nothing in the estabhshed ceremo- 
-*- nies of the Jewish national religion which was 
worthy of the name of preaching. That religion was 
administered mainly in the temple, the synagogues, 
and the theological schools. The synagogues were the 
parochial churches. They existed in every town in 
Judaea, The most elevated sites which could be ob- 
tained were chosen for them, and it violated all sense 
of Jewish propriety and sacredness to see any other 
building overlook the synagogue. Ten men were 
considered a sufficient but indispensable number to 
organize a synagogue, which word, like our word 
" church " came at length to signify either the eccle- 
siastical organism, or the building in which they as- 
sembled for worship. 

In any principal town or large city these buildings 
were multiplied indefinitely, all of them constructed 
after the same pattern. We may form some idea 
of their number when we consider that there were 
twelve in Tiberias ; and since the erecting of syna- 
gogues was a mark of piety and passport to heaven, 
we need not be surprised that there were no fewer 



248 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

than four hundred and sixty in Jerusalem alone. 
They were long rectangular structures, and always 
consisted of two parts. The icel, or sanctuary, by 
way of eminence, was in the most westerly part, cor- 
responding to the most holy place in the temple, and 
in it was placed the ark or chest which contained the 
Book of the Law and the Sections of the Prophets. 
The other part was the body of the church, where the 
congregation assembled. At one extremity of this 
department was an elevated platform, on which sat 
the officers of the synagogue, facing the congregation, 
and on which was a desk or pulpit for the readers 
and the minister. The congregation sat facing the 
officers. They did not sit promiscuously, but the 
men were separated from the women by a screen 
which divided the body of the church lengthwise as 
far as the elevated platform. 

The chief officers of the synagogue were three 
rulers, the readers, and the minister. The rulers 
had a general care and direction, told the leaders 
when to begin and the people when to say amen. 
The readers were seven in number, and took turns 
in reading the lesson of the day. Any one in the 
congregation, however, could be called to this ser- 
vice. How important and laborious it was may be 
judged from the fact that the Law and the Prophets, 
comprising the bulk of our Old Testament Canon, 
were required to be read through once a year in the 
public ritual, and for this purpose were divided into 



THE FORERUNNER, 



249 



fifty-two portions, one of which must be despatched 
every Sabbath-day. It must be read in the original 
Hebrew, and therefore there must be a translator to 
render it verse by verse into the language of the peo- 
ple, which in our Saviour's day was the Syro-Chal- 
dee. Besides this, several prayers must be recited. 
If we may credit Buxtorff, there were not less than 
eighteen belonging to the regular service, which fact 
gives us a vivid apprehension of our Saviour's words 
denouncing the greater damnation against men who 
for show make long prayers. After the prayers came 
the repetition of their phylacteries, which was done 
mentally and individually, out of regard for the law 
of God and as a guard against evil thoughts and evil 
spirits. These were texts of Scripture attached to 
their garments and worn generally near the heart. 
The synagogues were opened not on the Sabbath 
alone but on two other days during the week, which 
were regarded as a kind of fast-days, but the same 
lesson which was droned on these week-days was 
repeated on the Sabbath following for the benefit of 
the laboring class who could only attend during holy 
time. The superlative merits of the young ruler 
who fasted twice a week, can hence be estimated. 
He despatched one fifty-second part of the Law and 
the Prophets three times during every seven days, 
to say nothing of his phylacteries and the eighteen 
prayers which swelled still further the amount of his 
meritorious works. The readers, who were selected 



250 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

for their devotion or intelligence, were at liberty 
to throw in running commentaries of their own, 
though the stated duty of expounding the Scrip- 
ture devolved upon the minister, otherwise called 
the i\ngel of the Synagogue. This was done after 
the readers had got through, and with how much 
unction and enlargement may be judged from the 
fact that he generally spoke sitting in his seat. 

What torpor and spiritual death must at length 
overtake a people buried under such a load of ritual- 
ism as this ! We may well imagine how the startling 
news broke in upon the everlasting droning of the 
synagogue, when a man suddenly appeared of such 
fiery eloquence that he shook the whole valley of the 
Jordan from one mountain range to the other. Such 
was John the Baptist. The memorials of him, though 
few, bring him before us with great distinctness. 
The account given of him by Josephus, harmonizes 
remarkably with all that is said of him in the New 
Testament. His mother and the mother of Jesus 
were cousins-german, and John must have known 
something of his great kinsman by personal acquaint- 
ance ; but they did not reside near each other, and 
there is no reason for supposing that his inspiration 
came from that intercourse. His education was 
mainly in the desert. That is to say, like the 
Essenes, he withdrew in disgust from the hollow 
ritualism of the synagogues and the pedantry which 
loaded down the theological schools, and away in the 



THE FORERUNNER, 25 I 

silent places of contemplation, the power of God 
came upon him in over-measure, and clothed him as 
with a robe of flame. He must have known the Es- 
senes, as we said, for they were close by him on both 
sides of the Dead Sea, with the same doctrines of 
righteousness, the same disgust of Jewish hypocrisy, 
and the same baptism by immersion symbolizing re- 
pentance and newness of life. But John, in spirit 
and method, differed vastly from the Essenes, and 
did not belong to them. They were quietists aiming 
only to keep their own garments white, and to get to 
heaven by a secret way. John was aggressive, as the 
fire on a prairie swept by a mighty wind. Up and 
down the valley of the Jordan, where the desert 
skirted the line of cities and towns, he went in the 
power of the Lord, and poured his denunciations 
against hypocrisy and injustice. He was clothed in 
the coarse garb of the old prophets, with a leathern 
girdle about his loins. He lived in the very haunts 
where Elijah had lived, and ate the food of the desert. 
No greater man, said our Saviour, had been born of 
woman, and though the last of a long illustrious line 
of prophets, their moral power and grandeur culmi- 
nated in him. The Jews of his day had seen and 
heard nothing like him. Of course it was not long 
before the sleepy synagogues waked up and emptied 
themselves into the desert. They came at first, doubt- 
less out of curiosity, to see a seven-days' wonder, but 
|he truth shivered through them like the lightning, 



252 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

and converts were multiplied. People came not only 
from Judaea, but from remote Galilee. " What shall 
we do ? " said they, searched by the preacher s words. 
*' Let him who has two tunics give one to him who 
has none, and let him who has food, do likewise," was 
the answer, rebuking the prevailing covetousness and 
rapacity. It was a time of war between Herod and 
Aretas, King of Arabia, and soldiers were quartered 
in the land. These, too, came under the strokes of 
the preacher, and asked, " What shall we do } " " Be 
satisfied with your wages, and stop plundering the 
people." Tax-gatherers came, a hated and pestilent 
class of men, to whom some patrician in his palace at 
Rome committed the farming of the revenue, with 
unlimited license to peel the people of his province. 
" And what are we to do 1 " " Exact nothing but 
what is your due." Jerusalem itself was shaken. 
The travelled road through Jericho from the capital 
was choked with a living stream emptying itself into 
the desert. John himself seems to have been sur- 
prised to see them. " Have you come, too, you brood 
of vipers, out of your serpent's nest } Bring forth 
fruits worthy of repentance. Boast not of your de- 
scent from Abraham, for I declare to you that God 
out of these stones could make better children of 
Abraham than ye are." His fiery rebukes, however, 
not only smote the heart, but melted it. He made 
disciples, and founded a school, which survived long 
after his death, ff e irnpressed his great and earnest 



THE FORERUNNER. 253 

mind upon the mind of his nation, and the whole 
people cherished his fame as theirs. He was more 
than prophet ; as we shall see presently, he had the 
gift of seership beside. He was one of those great 
minds like the Grecian Demosthenes, in which the 
national life gathered intensity for a last effort, and 
flamed up with expiring brilliancy. Coming at the 
approach of a great crisis, and elevated far above the 
plodding interests of the hour, his ear heard distinctly 
the steps of the coming doom. Within the wider 
horizon which he swept with his eye, a great woe was 
in sight, and hourly drawing nearer. Hence his " cry 
in the wilderness " to repentance, as an escape from 
the wrath to come. But he belonged to the old dis- 
pensation and not the new. He was Hebrew through 
every fibre of his being. His call was to repentance, 
to the unchangeable moraUty, to the eternal justice 
which had been set aside for a pompous ecclesiasti- 
cism that filled itself with inhumanity and self-con- 
ceit, as a sponge imbibes water. But repentance and 
reformation were all he could preach. That opening 
of the heavens through which the Spirit was to come 
for a new creation and a new consciousness of God 
in human nature, was not given to him, and he knew 
it. But he knew that this, too, must come, and he 
watched for its prognostics in the faith that he was . 
sent to prepare the way. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE HOMES OF JESUS. 

'THHE idea we get of Jesus from a cursory and 
-*- superficial reading of the Evangelists, of a 
homeless wanderer, with no place of permanent 
abode, roaming about Palestine with twelve men, liv- 
ing by miracle, or claiming the hospitality of stran- 
gers, soon melts away on a more careful study of the 
records. He had his abiding-places, whence he went 
forth on his mission, and into whose shadows he ever 
returned either from the glare of notoriety, from the 
heat and burden of the day, or from the threats and 
persecutions of those who sought his life. Indeed, 
much of his time was passed in this retirement in 
preparation for his public work, which seems to be 
the reason of a common mistake, — that this work 
was all crowded into the last two or three years of 
his life. 

The homes of Jesus were three. These are very 
distinctly traced. It is necessary always to keep 
,them in mind if we would contemplate his life in its 
unity, and understand the coherence with which the 
Evangelists have described it. It is from want of 
attention to this subject that some writers talk of 



I 



THE HOMES OF JESUS, 255 

discrepancies, especially between John and the syn- 
optics, where they only interlock each other in a con- 
sistent whole. 

The home of his childhood and earliest manhood 
we have already described. That Joseph and Mary 
belonged neither to the highest nor the lowest rank, 
but to the robust and healthful middle class of Jewish 
society, is abundantly evident. There was a school 
attached to the synagogue, in which Jewish children 
were taught to read and write, and also instructed in 
the canonical writings of the Old Testament. Jesus 
must have been educated in this school. That he at- 
tended any higher one, is very improbable ; indeed, 
it is implied in the narratives, that he did not. " Hav- 
ing never learned," means that he never had been 
a scholar in those higher schools of the Rabbins, 
where he would only have imbibed the intolerable 
pedantry embodied in the " Talmud " at a later day. 
The law and the prophets which he learned to read 
at the synagogue, and the great book of nature spread 
out gloriously from the plateau just above, must have 
been the sources of the lore which he acquired at 
his home. in Nazareth. 

There was another home which he occupied after- 
ward, and during a part of his public ministry. It 
was at Capernaum, on the northwestern shore of the 
lake of Galilee, some seventeen miles from Nazareth. 
The narrative warrants the inference that acquaint- 
ances and kinsfolk of his mother's family resided 



256 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

there, as they went thither on a temporary visit be- 
fore a final removal of residence.^ It is certain that 
a married sister of his mother resided in Galilee, the 
wife of Alphaeus, otherwise called Cleopas, two of 
whose sons, Jude and James the less, afterwards were 
numbered among the chosen twelve. She might 
have resided at Capernaum or its neighborhood, as 
she is found afterward associated with women who 
belonged there. 

The Sea of Galilee has been called the Geneva of 
Palestine, on account of the picturesque beauty and 
sublimity of its scenery. It is about sixteen miles in 
length, and half as many in breadth, deep set within 
a cordon of lofty hills. Through these hills there are 
two openings, one on the north for the ingress of the 
waters of the Jordan, another on the south for their 
egress. They make a current through the middle of 
the lake, but elsewhere lie in their deep basin, still as 
glass, and giving back as truly the skies above them 
and the scenery around, except when some sudden 
gust finds its way over the hills, which is very sel- 
dom. The hills are now brown and stripped of for- 
est ; but if we may trust Josephus, this region, in thef 
times of our Saviour, was so luxuriant, that nature 
seemed to work here a perpetual miracle. Fruits 
which required a hot climate, and others which re- 
quired a cold one, grew and flourished side by side." 
" One may call it," he says, " the ambition of Nature, 

1 John ii. 12. 



THE HOMES OF JESUS. 25/ 

where it forces those plants that are naturally ene- 
mies to each other, to agree together.^ On the west- 
ern side of the lake the hills trend away from the 
shores, and along its margin stood five cities, or 
towns, whose names have become immortal. Near 
the head of the lake stood Bethsaida and Capernaum, 
which had become noted stations for fisheries ; far- 
ther south, probably, were Chorazin and Magdala, 
and farther still, Tiberias, built by Herod the Te- 
trarch, the murderer of John the Baptist, and often 
occupied by him as one of his capitals. 

Along the shores of this peaceful lake, Jesus went 
forth from his home in Capernaum, on his heavenly 
errands. Here he found most of his twelve disci- 
ples. Here he wrought those wonderful cures which 
blazoned his name through the country, so that the 
crowds flocked about him whenever he appeared 
abroad. Galilee contained a mixed population, not 
Jews only, but people of heathen religions and of no 
religion, Greeks, Syrians, and Phoenicians, and though 
more ignorant and boorish than the pure orthodox of 
Judaea, they had much less of the flint of Jewish big- 
otry and pride. Almost the whole narrative of the 
synoptics is taken up with the work of Christ in Gal- 
ilee, as it radiated from his home in Capernaum. 
There were personal reasons for this, as we shall 
see. Matthew and Peter, who were eye and ear wit- 
nesses of what they relate, resided at Capernaum, 

1 Wars^ iii. x. 8. 
17 



25 8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

and their own work as missionaries was mainly in 
Galilee. 

But there was another locality which was also 
one of the homes of Jesus. It was such before he 
went to Capernaum. To understand this portion of 
our Saviour's life, we must divest ourselves at once 
of a good share of our occidental notions about re- 
ligious culture. We are the least given to contem- 
plation, solitude, and introversion, of any people on 
the face of the earth. We rush into crowds, hold 
meetings, din each other with sermons and exhorta- 
tions, which sermons and exhortations are generally 
the common places of the sect we belong to ; and the 
shallow draughts from each other s well-nigh empty 
pitchers, we call getting religion. It was not so in 
the East. They drew from deeper wells. All but 
the book-men and the pedants who only reproduced 
each other in geometrical progression till the tra- 
ditions were too heavy to bear, drew their deepest 
draughts from the springs of divine grace in the 
meditative soul. 

Long before Jesus appeared, what was best in re- 
ligion, what was highest and purest in morality, was 
withdrawn from public view. The Essenes, if we 
may credit Josephus and Philo, — the former of whom 
dwelt among them three years to learn of their doc- 
trine and manners, — preserved about the only cultus 
which existed in the East, purified from idolatry, su- 
perstition, and hypocrisy. Near the western shores 



THE HOMES OF JESUS, 259 

of the Dead Sea, a community of these people ex- 
isted in seclusion, disgusted with the knavery and 
petrified selfishness which lurked under all the forms 
of the popular religion, and there they maintained a 
lofty devotion, a pure doctrine of God, immortality, 
and retribution, with an unselfish morality and un- 
corrupted manners. The}^ had all things in common. 
They had ramified into other communions of like 
faith which existed in the deserts and sometimes in 
the cities and towns, receiving the books of Moses, 
which they interpreted allegorically, never going up 
to the Jewish festivals, nor appearing in the tem- 
ple, but "gazing on the bright countenance of Truth," 
in their own quiet contemplations. They dwelt on 
the love of God, denounced every kind of dishonesty, 
and insisted on justice, piety, and neighborly love. 
Baptism by immersion was a common practice among 
them, not only for keeping the body chaste and 
wholesome, but as the symbol of a clean heart. 
Their constancy was brought to the severest trial ; 
for Herod put them to cruel tortures, which they 
would not only meet with serenity, but with a smile 
of triumph over pain and death, radiant with the 
hope of immortality. 

There is no evidence that either Jesus or John the 
Baptist ever visited these people, but there is abun- 
dant evidence that both of them combined the rites, 
the morality, and some of the doctrine of the Essenes 
with their own. John must have known of them, for' 



26o THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

he preached and baptized in their immediate neigh- 
borhood, where he thundered forth their maxims of 
truth and justice. 

Admitting that Luke's Gospel and Matthew's pref- 
ace give us the true account respecting the concep- 
tion and birth of Jesus, it must be obvious that there 
were twofold reasons for his withdrawment betimes 
from the disturbances of outward things. The Word 
that was to be given him was to come neither from 
human teachers nor from the external world. It was 
to come down through the opening heaven of his own 
mind as soon as the sensuous nature which he re- 
ceived through the maternal humanity had drawn up 
from earthly things the types and images which were 
to serve as the prints and copies of the heavenly. 
Necessity was, therefore, laid upon him by the con- 
stitution of his being, to pass away from the outward 
till the heavenly realities filled and possessed his 
consciousness. The whole nights spent in prayer, 
away from his disciples and on the lonely mountain 
heights, must not be understood as time occupied in 
verbal petitions to God. We shall see presently that 
nothing of the kind is signified. 

The great Ghor, or valley of the Jordan, extends 
from the lake of Galilee to the Dead Sea, through 
some seventy miles. Throughout it presents the 
same phenomena. Two ranges of hills and bluffs 
bound it on either side, — that on the west skirting 
Galilee, Samaria, and a part of Judaea ; that on the 



THE HOMES OF JESUS. 26 1 

east skirting the land of Peraea, the country beyond 
the Jordan. From the summit of one of these ranges 
you look across to the other. Sometimes they ap- 
proach each other to within five miles, sometimes 
they trend away to eight or ten. They are rocky and 
precipitous, and rise over two thousand feet above 
the bed of the river. This great valley is cut by the 
Jordan unequally. As it issues from the lake of 
Galilee it leaves most of the valley on the east, but 
before entering the Dead Sea it leaves two thirds of 
it on the side of Palestine, creeping nearer the Persean 
hills. 

The great valley itself is composed of two plains, 
an upper and lower one. The lower one is a mile in 
width, making the bed of the river itself, filled to the 
outer edge when the river is swollen, but offering 
quite a margin when, in times of drought, the river 
shrinks within its channel. This margin of the lower 
plane, therefore, being alternately wet and dry, is 
covered with reeds and bushes, and sometimes with 
tall trees, which harbor wild beasts of prey. Here 
lurked the lion who "came up at the swelling of 
Jordan" from his lair. The upper plain, extending 
from this reedy margin to the blufis, is a barren waste 
of marl and ashy soil, presenting a scene of awful 
desolation. It is from two to four miles in breadth 
on either side. Sometimes, where the upper plane 
terminates with the blufis, springs of water percolate 
through the rocks, making little oases, as is the case 



262 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

opposite Jericho. Sometimes the bluffs are rent by 
steep gorges which are the beds of rapid rivers in 
wet seasons, and in dry become cavernous and shaggy 
ravines. 

What we have now described was known as the 
Desert or the Wilderness. The valley " on this side 
Jordan" from Samaria to the Dead Sea was "the 
Wilderness of Judaea," some twelve miles in length. 
As soon as you enter these profound solitudes you 
leave man behind, and the blandishments of his 
hypocrisy and the noise of his battles are heard no 
more. 

The exceptions to this solitude are only found 
where springs and rivulets trickle through the moun- 
tains and make oases at their base. Most fa- 
mous among these are *' The Fountains of Jericho." 
Jericho is gone, and only dirty Arab hovels now 
occupy its site. But the fountains are still there ; 
and what would be an oasis is there if it did not run 
to bushes and sedge. But here in our Saviour's day 
rose the goodly city itself, called sometimes the City 
of Palms. It stood within the great valley, but hugged 
the base of the mountain, commanding a fertile plain 
covered with groves and gardens which the fountains 
had rescued from the desert. Through a gorge of 
the mountain lay the road to Jerusalem twenty miles 
off, leading around splintered rocks and through 
gloomy and shaggy defiles, the haunt of thieves and 
robbers. Jericho was a city of priests and Levites, 



THE HOMES OF JESUS. 263 

it being a favorite resort of the officials at Jerusalem 
when not on duty in the service of the temple. 

Passing through this road from Jerusalem and en- 
tering the desert through Jericho, the traveller, in our 
Saviour s time, would soon leave the palm groves and 
gardens behind. As he travels towards the Jordan he 
passes over five miles of desert and comes to a ferry, 
by which the Jordan must be crossed. If he is in 
quest of a solitude still more profound, or an isolation 
from Jewish priestcraft still more perfect, he will cross 
over by this ferry into Peraea beyond the Jordan. 
There is no village on the opposite side, but only a 
ferry-house, with perhaps a few buildings. This is 
the place anciently called Bethabara, which means 
simply the ford, or place of passage, but which seems 
afterwards to have taken the name of Bethany-over- 
the-Jordan. Coming hither, the traveller has put both 
the Jordan and the wilderness of Judaea between him- 
self and the busy Jewish world. But he has only 
come into a remoter solitude and into wilderness still. 
It is desert for two miles between the Jordan and the 
mountains of Peraea and all the way up and down 
the river. Opposite are the hills from whose summit 
the promised land broke on the rapt vision of Moses, 
and this Bethabara is the identical ford which his 
knights of the Ram's-horn crossed over to take 
Jericho. 

And in this vicinity was one of the dwelling-places 
of Jesus for some time before he went to Capernaum, 



264 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

and to which he resorted again and again, both for 
the opening of the inner heavens and for escape from 
the snares of men.^ He did not merely come hither 
to John's baptism ; he was dwelling here while that 
great preacher was declaring his message. He came 
hither from Judaea when tired of Jewish bigotry and 
hypocrisy. He made this his abiding-place till re- 
plenished anew from the Divine armory, when he 
went forth for fresh strokes on the flint of Jewish 
malice and hate. Up to the time of John's arrest 
and imprisonment, when he left for Galilee, this was 
his most frequent place of retirement and abode, and 
this was his starting-place for new journeys into 
Judaea. His ministry began at Jerusalem agreeably 
to the theory of Scripture that salvation should come 
out of the heart of Judaism and thence extend over 
the world. After John's arrest, and his ministry had 
changed its circuit for Galilee, still he came hither to 
his retreat in the valley of the Jordan, as if its springs 

1 See John i. 38, 39 ; x. 40 ; xi. 54. Compare Matt. xix. 19 ; Mark 
X. I, 46. In the passage (Matt. iv. 13) where Jesus is said to dwell in 
Capernaum, we read, KaTcpKr)(r€i/, — he housed there. But where he 
is said to dweU in the desert we have (John i. 39), ^eVer, — he remained 
there, suggesting a less fixed abode, perhaps in movable tents. The 
town called Ephraim, near the desert where Jesus went and dwelt 
(5teTpt)86, spent the time) to conceal himself from the Jews, is of un- 
certain locality. Perhaps it was the ancient city of that name near 
Jericho. It would seem that he spent the time, not in the city, which 
would be no place of concealment, but in the desert near by, and that 
in emerging from his concealment he passed through Jericho. See 
Mark x. 46. 



THE HOMES OF JESUS. 265 

and rocks and solitudes had been made sweet by 
angel ministries and the communings of sabbatic 
hours. In these solitudes the inner heavens first 
opened on his sight ; and in these again they opened 
in yet more solemn grandeur, and over long reaches 
of prophecy just before, he started on his last journey 
to Jerusalem ; for it was from these retreats, where 
he had remained for some time, that he went up to 
the last Passover, knowing that he went as the Lamb 
of God for sacrifice. After finally breaking away 
from his home at Nazareth, Bethabara, or some spot 
near this ferry of the Jordan, was his point of depart- 
ure for his mission into Judaea, as Capernaum was his 
point of departure for his mission in Galilee. Even 
when passing from Galilee into Judaea, his route often 
lay through these profound solitudes, and there he 
would abide for a time before committing himself 
anew to that hot-bed of sanctimonious iniquity at 
Jerusalem. Sometimes in these retreats the people 
followed him and sought him out to be cured of 
their diseases or to hang upon his speech. 



CHAPTER VIL 

JESUS IN THE DESERT. 

JOHN had stationed himself by the ferry, beyond 
the Jordan, and near the great thoroughfare 
through the Desert. Thither the people streamed in 
crowds from both sides of the river to the scene of 
what in modern phrase would be called the Great 
Revival of the time. John's was the first word since 
the days of the old prophets which had thoroughly 
shattered the crust of the Jewish formalism, thrilling 
the masses with an agonizing consciousness of spirit- 
ual want. In the natural language of hyperbole used 
by the New Testament writers, " Jerusalem and all 
Judaea, and all the country adjacent to the Jordan," 
came to his preaching and were immersed by him in 
the waters of the river as the symbol of their repent- 
ance and reformation. 

Jesus came also to Bethabara from his home in 
Nazareth, not, as we shall see, merely to receive bap- 
tism from John. The Divine Idea, for whose realiza- 
tion he came into the world, must have grown urgent 
within him by this time, and he must have seen that 
the word of John, which had shaken all the syna- 
gogues out of their sleep, was preparing the way for 



JESUS IN THE DESERT. 26/ 

the new kingdom of God to be ushered in. Hence 
he gave his sanction to John's preparatory work, and 
his personal compUance with it, as if saying, *' This 
is not the work of one who hath a demon and is mad, 
as some of your magnates affirm, but work which 
comes in the orderly course of Divine Providence." 
He left Nazareth and appeared at Bethabara. 

It is necessary here to unfold a principle of inter- 
pretation, without which we shall find ourselves 
stumbling at every step, not only at the beginning 
here of our Saviour's public life, but through every 
stage of it to the close. We must forget here again 
and leave behind us our cold and sensuous occident- 
alism and enter largely into the thought and the faith 
of the Orient. Language which with us has sunk 
into the baldest materiahsm, or else has been frozen 
into the coldest and the hardest of philosophical ab- 
stractions, to the spiritualized Hebrew mind, much 
more to the mind of Jesus, was preserved from all 
such perversion. For instance, our words heaven, 
\ hell, angel, demon, Satan, and their correlates, mean 
with us localities in space and beings of material cor- 
poreity ; or if we say they cannot mean that, we pro- 
ceed to discharge them of substantial realism, leaving 
nothing but a nominalism that floats vague and 
empty in the air. The New Testament writers and 
speakers fall into neither of these errors, but are clear 
alike of both. 

We are to remember here — and we only restate 



268 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

the principle of our opening chapter — that there 
are two orders of existence, — one natural and on a 
level with the senses ; the other supernatural and 
beyond their sweep and range. Men hold commerce 
with the first through their material organism ; they 
hold commerce with the second, if at all, through an 
interior and higher one. Death discharges immortal 
beings from their material coverings, but it does not 
, extinguish their personality. They are men still, and 
not abstract ideas of men existing only in the gener- 
alizations of human thought, and the corruption of 
the sepulchres. 

To understand the Realism of the New Testament, 
we must remember that its supernatural world is not 
one of abstractions. It is one of forms and substan- 
ces not less than this ; and for the very reason that it 
is not material and subject to hard material law, it is a 
more perfect symbolization of Divine truth, and more 
pliant to envisage the supreme excellence and beauty. 
The words "heaven" and "kingdom of heaven" de- 
scribe, it is true, a state of the purified soul here in 
its earthly condition ; but if we suppose that in the 
New Testament realism they mean nothing more, 
but therein are shriveled to an abstraction, there is a 
great gulf between its realm of thought and ours. 
Involved essentially in the conception is the idea of 
the supernal abodes, the angelic societies above us 
and yet near us when we become like them, and 
whether visible or invisible, imparting to us or shar- 
ing with us the shinings of the eternal peace. 



JESUS IN THE DESERT, 269 

" Heaven opened," therefore, does not mean merely, 
in the language of those times, a more vivid appre- 
hension, mentally, of abstract truth. That may be 
included and implied^ but a great deal more is also 
implied. It means that the inner sight has been so 
touched and clarified that the heavenly scenery lies 
objectively around it ; where the prints and copies of 
that truth itself image it forth more perfectly and 
divinely, just as th'ey do to those who have passed 
out of time and space into the open prospect of the 
eternal realities. We may say that this is imagina- 
tion, and we shall say so if we believe with the Sad- 
ducees that there are no tiers of substantial being 
above the flats of nature ; but we must not project 
our philosophy into the New Testament and freeze 
down its language into figures of speech, when it is 
plain from its whole pneumatology, that the writers 
do not intend a mere play with rhetoric, but a de- 
scription of things heard and seen. 

There were two classes of Hebrew prophets. There 
were those who simply uttered the word which came 
to them with a " Thus saith the Lord," and there 
were those whose inspiration passed into seership or 
open vision. Elijah was not only prophet but seer. 
John, who came in the spirit and power of Elijah, but 
was greater than he, was also both prophet and seer. 
He was such, according to the narrative^ by the divine 
gift which commissioned him for his work ; but his 
ascetic and contemplative mode of life would tend 



270 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

inevitably to reveal it strongly and clearly to his con- 
sciousness. 

The world was expecting a deliverer. Not the 
Jews only but the devout of all nations believed that 
a great crisis was near, and watched with aching eyes 
for the tokens of the coming man. The influx from 
the higher world of causes, prognostic of great 
changes, was urgent now. But in the mind of the 
Baptist it took voice distinct and articulate and came 
as the voice of the Lord. He knew Jesus well but 
he did not know him as the Messiah. He only 
knew him as a man wonderfully endowed, in whose 
presence he felt overshadowed and subdued. But he 
knew and felt that his own work was only external 
and provisional, and that a Power which wrought 
deeper and more universal than his baptism of water 
must melt down the heart of the world and shape 
it in heavenly moulds. The impression upon his 
mind, divinely given, had become so full and over- 
powering as to become languaged in the depths of 
his soul. It was in substance this, " The man for 
whom the nations wait will be signalized to your 
apprehension. You will know him, for to your vision 
the Holy Spirit will descend and abide upon him. 
Understand then that the person who will thus be 
designated is the expected Messiah, who will take up 
the work which you have only begun, and baptize the 
world with fire. He will not only reform its manners 
without, but purge it of evil within." Of course the 



JESUS IN THE DESERT. 2/1 

Holy Spirit working subjectively in the mind of Jesus 
would have been no token to John. What John was 
looking for was an open vision of that Divine Sphere 
above and within the sensuous and earthly, which 
would infold the Son of God, and in which the power 
of the Holy Spirit to give purity and peace would be 
imaged forth by appropriate signs. 

John was burdened with this thought when Jesus 
appeared through the crowd before him on the banks 
of the Jordan. But Jesus, as we have said, had not 
travelled sixty miles from Nazareth merely to receive 
baptism from John. It is plain from the whole con- 
nection that his dwelling-place in the desert was 
near by ; the Proseucha ^ to which he had already 
withdrawn amid the profound solitudes of the valley, 
where the din of human society was unheard and 
nature itself no longer wooed the soul outward 
through the senses ; where '' the weary weight of all 
this unintelligible world " was lightened or rolled 
away ; and the higher world emerged through the 
rifted and scattering clouds. After such ascent into 
heaven as this, Jesus appeared before John. Evi- 

1 A Proseucha among the Hebrew people was simply an oratory, or 
place of retirement for thought and devotion. Sometimes they were 
on mountains ; sometimes by the side of rivers. Sometimes they 
were artificial, simple structures open at the top to the sky ; some- 
times only an embowering shade. In Acts xvi. 13, we are told that 
Paul and his companions on the Sabbath " went out of the city by a 
river side where prayer was wont to be made " (ou iuofxi^ero irpoa-evxh 
ehai), literally, *' where he understood that there was a Proseucha." 



2/2 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

dently heaven itself was in sphering Him and beam- 
ing from his face. John is overcome with reverent 
emotion : " I have more need to be baptized by thee." 
Jesus rephes, " It becomes us to fulfill all righteous- 
ness." Your baptism of reformation comes first in 
the Divine order and has its rightful place. 

" And while all the people were receiving baptism, 
Jesus also being baptized and praying, the heaven 
was opened, and the Holy Spirit in a bodily form, 
descended upon him like a dove, and a voice came 
from heaven saying, ' Thou art my beloved Son, with 
thee I am well pleased.' " Luke iii. 21, 22. 

" Being baptized and praying^' the heaven was 
opened. Let us not mistake. Prayer with Jesus was 
not simply a verbal petition. It was passing inward 
and upward out of the realm of sense into the broad 
disclosure of eternal things. He has described it as 
" ascending into heaven," and his teachings and rev- 
elations out of that high state as " coming down 
from heaven," and the normal elevation of his soul 
amid the eternal serenities and perspectives of im- 
mortality as being or dwelling "in heaven." The 
heaven was opened, to whom } Clearly to the mind 
of Jesus into which the Divine influx came with 
such fullness and power as to take voice and artic- 
ulation, and over whom the white wings hovering 
dove-like symbolized its all-cleansing and peace- 
giving work through a Saviour's mediation ; and 
to the mind of John brought into this open vision 



I 



JESUS IN THE DESERT, 2/3 

and communion where the promised tokens were 
disclosed to him. " I saw and I bear witness that 
this is the Son of God." He knew him not as the 
Messiah until then. Now his tone changes towards 
his own followers. I am not the coming Deliverer, 
but He is already among you. I have seen Him 
though you cannot. He must wax and I must wane. 
Once in his lonely prison hours, weary with what 
seemed the long delay, doubts flitted over the mind 
of John and he sent to Jesus for further evidence. It 
may be hoped that the answer he received reassured 
him of the divine authentication in the heavenly 
vision by the waters of the Jordan. 

The Spirit remanded Jesus to his solitude. A great 
conflict was inevitable. Such incoming of the Divine 
truth, glory, and power through the inmost conscious- 
ness towards their ultimations in the outward life 
could not be without meeting and waking into armed 
resistance all the hereditary tendencies of the Jewish 
mind. All these had been subsumed in the maternal 
humanity received through Mary. They had grown 
with the growth and strengthened with the strength 
of the sensuous nature which for thirty years had 
drank in the glories of this lower world. The hered- 
itary proclivities of a long line of ancestry running 
away up through Jewish kings and priests yearning 
for worldly empire and ecclesiastical rule, looking 
towards a Messianic kingdom, which, beginning at 

Jerusalem, should overspread the earth and absorb all 

i8 



274 ^-^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. 

Other kingdoms into itself, all these were waked up 
as if by a voice sweeping down into the soul as the cu- 
mulative urgencies of a thousand years. The posses- 
sion of superhuman power had now come to Jesus, no 
longer in the dim twilight of consciousness, but in its 
noonday brightness. It was power, compared with 
which that of David and Solomon, the pride and boast 
of the Jewish annals, was contemptible. We do not 
know of any chapter in history more true to nature 
and bearing more indubitable marks of reality than 
that of the temptation of Jesus. It never could have 
come within the experience of feeble and shallow na- 
tures, but only those which are deeply and broadly 
representative, and which take up and compress vast 
provinces and ages of history into their own. In 
such as these the influx of heaven becomes strong as 
it meets and conquers the efflux of hell. 

Let us pause a moment at the words " devil " and 
" satan." They never mean, in any canonical Scrip- 
ture, a fallen angel. Nor again do they mean " the 
abstract principle of moral evil." Neither Jesus nor 
his biographers know anything of these philosophi- 
cal nonentities. To them the demon- world, no less 
than the angel, was real, active, and personal, im- 
breathing through the souls of men and projecting 
infernal sorceries through their minds and imagina- 
tions. It was composed of the spirits of bad men 
who had lived in the flesh, and were, therefore, hu- 
man, like ourselves, but unregenerate. Like the 



JESUS IN THE DESERT. 2/5 

angel world, it lay proximate to this, but on the side 
of our lusts and evils, which it breathed upon and 
fanned into flame. The words devil and satan de- 
scribed originally the supposed prince of this king- 
dom of evil ; but they ceased to become mere proper 
names, and stood simply for the impersonation of all 
the seductive influence from the realm of darkness ; 
and on the other hand such proper names as Gabriel 
and Michael might denote perhaps the influx of the 
angel-world itself. But the New Testament writers 
give no sanction to the childish superstition of devils 
assuming material bodies, and in that shape set free 
on the earth for temptation and mischief. 

The Spirit remanded Jesus to his solitudes. Heights 
of exaltation and depths of depression and trial are 
u lavoidable i i minds whose range is large enough to 
include the profoundest workings of God. Having 
just now become conscious of most divine endow- 
ments, the whole spirit of Judaism, from Abraham 
down to Mary, rose up in his soul to clutch these ce- 
lestial weapons, and wield them only for Jewish ends. 
Yes, farther, the awakened selfhood of human nature, 
including its hereditary proclivities from Adam down, 
sought to bring these endowments into the service 
of self alone, and so place the son of Mary in conflict 
with the Son of God, and, if possible, subject the 
latter to his will. 

We follow Matthew's order. The first temptation 
came in this form : " Turn these stones into loaves 



2/6 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

and live by them alone." Or, dropping the language 
of parable, Be satisfied with the lowest and most ex- 
ternal life of sense, and with that alone, for stones are 
the lowest grade of external things. What visions 
of ease and self-gratification are here comprehensively 
described ! all of which could pass at once to their 
realization if the divine power newly-awakened could 
be subsidized to such an end. Such a course were 
compatible with all the pride of life, including the 
pride of knowledge, the pride of philanthropy, all 
tending, however, to exalt self and surround it with 
worldly decorations. Such was the tempting path 
now obvious, and it led to no cross, no conflict, and 
no sacrifice. 

The next temptation was deeper and more subtle. 
It placed Jesus in the Holy City and on the pinnacle 
of its temple ; in other words, at the very summit of 
the Jewish ecclesiasticism. The highest exaltation 
to which the Jewish religious system could elevate 
him now rose upon his view. All the honors of its 
high priesthood, enlarged beyond its ancient pomp 
and splendor, were within his grasp. Already he had 
confounded the Doctors in the temple by his preco- 
cious wisdom, and now a wisdom more pervasive and 
comprehending than that of the whole Sanhedrim, or 
all the scholars of Hillel, was his. It lay in his power 
to raise Judaism to a fame which would outshine its 
brightest days in the past, if, instead of breaking its 
forms in pieces, he would throw his Spirit into them 



JESUS IN THE DESERT. 277 

and make them more glorious than ever. Its priest- 
hood would renew its fading lustre, and all its honors 
would cluster around his person. No conception of 
ours at this day is adequate to the fact which is here 
tersely set forth ; a temptation that winds into the 
most hidden recesses of human nature. Ecclesiasti- 
cal ambition is the most devilish of all, for it perverts 
a more interior and more sacred principle than any 
other, appears always in sanctimonious guises, and 
secretes a more specious and deadly poison. But 
Jewish ecclesiasticism excelled all others in this re- 
spect ; and now the pride and conceit of a long and 
splendid priestly line, swelling and gathering force 
with every new generation, was sending its last efflux 
into the mind of Jesus. Had it prevailed it would 
have placed him in Moses' seat, the most authorita- 
tive, the most accomplished, the most honored of all 
the Pharisees. 

The remaining temptation, though not so subtle, 
appealed to an instinct more universally dangerous. 
It placed Jesus at the summit of Jewish national re- 
nown. It showed him all the kingdoms of the world, 
and he at their head as the long looked-for temporal 
Messiah. The magnificent national dream could now 
be made actual. It had become an essential of Jewish 
faith engrained in the heart of every loyal man and 
woman, that the boundaries of Judaea were to widen 
and widen over the earth, and over the isles of the 
sea, and over all peoples, till Jerusalem should be the 



2/8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

capital of the world, till ^' the Gentiles should come 
to its light, and kings to the brightness of its rising." 
The grand old spiritual promises had sunk from their 
meaning into the grossest literalism, and pampered 
the national pride with the expectation of unbounded 
empire. It was kept alive continually as they an- 
swered " Amen '^ in the synagogues to the ancient 
prophecies. ^"The sons of thine oppressors shall 
come bending before thee : they that despised thee 
shall fall down at thy feet." ^ How this vision flamed 
up to its highest grandeur as it took body and shape 
in a mind like that of Jesus, till " all the kingdoms 
of the world in a moment of time " were seen crowd- 
ing to his standard in endless ranks ; how the stream 
of national pride pouring through the hearts of all the 
Jewish kings into his was urgent to grasp the divine 
weapons now fairly in his hands, subjugate the Ro- 
man oppressor, and inaugurate the universal reign 
which all the prophets had foretold, — all this we 
may faintly imagine from our knowledge of hereditary 
proclivities, which set in strongest and swiftest tides 
through the largest and most receptive natures. 

Forty days, say the records, these temptations 
continued, or, as Luke says, till the devil, "having 
come to an end of every temptation," left Him. 
Forty days, in Scripture usage, is an indefinite num- 
ber, and means simply, as Luke intimates, a time, 
whether longer or shorter, during which the thing 

1 Isaiah Ix. 14. 



JESUS IN THE DESERT. 279 

appointed to it is accomplished and complete. " The 
forty days' temptations," as we understand, are the 
terse and graphic summing up of the whole conflict 
up to the time of the pubUc ministry of Jesus, — the 
conflict in which the descending heavens met and 
subdued the principles of earth and hell, and thus 
found their unobstructed ultimation in his mind and 
in his life. The abounding peace which followed, 
where, we are told, that as Satan left him, angels 
came and ministered unto him, is also strictly 
accordant with all our human experience. Those 
blessed ministries come like tranquillity after storms, 
consequent on all our moral and spiritual victories. 
They come to us in the mellow sunshine of the heart, 
flung from the face of God and the invisible presence 
of those who reflect his beams ; they came to him 
not only in the peace within, but in the " heavens 
opened," amid whose visible serenities he won his 
abiding-place. 

It is plain that the narration of these conflicts 
comes originally from the lips of Jesus in that com- 
prehensive language of parable which he was wont 
to employ. They have the air of most intense reality ; 
they were witnessed by no mortal eye, and they are 
the last things which his disciples afterwards would 
have invented or imagined with the intent of glorify- 
ing their Master. Mark puts the whole in, but very 
concisely, evidently not knowing what to make of it. 
John omits it, for the plain reason that he wrote 



280 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

with a full knowledge that the other three Gospels 
were in possession of all the churches, and that this 
history already had been thrice told. John, of all the 
others, would have entered most profoundly into its 
vast spiritual import. Luke seems to have done this 
more than either Matthew or Mark, and Luke was' 
probably in communication with John. Portions of 
Luke's Gospel are essentially the narrative of the 
beloved disciple. 

Up to this time we have been following Jesus in 
the common and blending light which the four evan- 
gelists have thrown upon his path. We now come 
to a point where the synoptics leave us, and where 
for some time, and for the most part always in his 
more private walks, John is our only guide. We ask 
the reader's attention now to the following points, 
which, if carefully observed, will verify to him as he 
reads on how these biographies interlace each other 
with most remarkable congruity. 

i'. The distinctive Messianic work of Jesus begins 
at the close of the temptation scene. The Word had 
not merely glimmered in his consciousness ; it had 
not merely emerged into full intellectual brightness, 
but it had "become flesh." It had cleared off all the 
hindrances of hereditary and Jewish selfhood, and 
now not only in the inmost but the outermost life, in 
mind and will and action so far as concerns his mis- 
sion, Jesus is the Wisdom and the Power of God. 
From this complete Messianic consciousness, his 



JESUS IN THE DESERT, 28 1 

special work begins, and it divides itself into two 
portions : into his ministry, which was more private 
and personal, and his ministry, which was more pub- 
lic and organized. 

2. His private and personal ministry began first, as 
of course it would. It was for some time informal 
and tentative. It was mainly in Jerusalem and its 
environs, in that yearning toward his own people to 
save them first from the wrath impending over the 
nation. This personal ministry covers, at least, the 
first year of his Messianic work. During this time 
he had no organized band of followers. A few in- 
timate friends who believed in him, were generally 
with him, and travelled with him, and among them 
and most cherished of all, was the beloved John. 
In this personal and mere informal ministry in and 
about Jerusalem he encountered always the bigotry 
of the ruling ecclesiastical power, and acted under 
threats against his life. There was no possibility 
here of any organized public work. His home, thus 
far, was partly at Nazareth, partly in the desert, 
whither he would withdraw for concealment. 

3. Soon after the arrest and imprisonment of the 
Baptist, he removed to Capernaum. There his 
public ministry commenced. He was thronged by 
the multitudes, and out of these he selected and or- 
ganized two separate bands of disciples, the Twelve 
and the Seventy, whom he indoctrinated more thor- 
oughly, and on whom he conferred miraculous pow- 



282 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

ers. Through these he evangeized ths whole of 
GaHlee. But even here we must not imagine him 
travelHng about with twelve men. They dispersed 
over the whole province, appearing generally in the 
synagogues. The Twelve went, it would seem, indi- 
vidually ; the Seventy, two and two. The latter was 
a temporary, the former a permanent organization. 
Both would return to Jesus and report the fruits of 
their mission, but only on special occasions were the 
Twelve together with Jesus. So much we gather 
clearly from the account given of this organized 
work without knowing the minute details. Two of 
the synoptics confine their narrative almost entirely 
to the public ministry in Galilee, till they come to the 
tragic consummation at the last Passover, for the sim- 
ple reason that here, with his public ministry, they 
were personally concerned, and here only were eye 
and ear witnesses. 

4. But we must not imagine that while his organ- 
ized missionaries were at work, Jesus was idle at 
Capernaum. His work in and around Capernaum 
was notorious, and the synoptics have detailed it. 
But this was not all. He did not abandon Judaea, 
but his private personal ministry he prosecuted there 
still. People were there who believed in him, whom 
his first ministry had deeply moved, who had clung 
to him with devoted love, and several times from his 
home at Capernaum, as before from his home at 
Nazareth, he went up to the capital. But he always 



JESUS IN THE DESERT. 283 

went privately and cautiously, often withdrawing of 
a sudden either to the desert or back into Galilee. 
He went up to the festivals, but except at the last 
and fatal Passover, he went after the crowds had 
gone, and followed on with the least possible demon- 
stration. We must not imagine him marching up to 
Jerusalem with the Twelve, but appearing with one 
or two friends, among whom always was the beloved 
John. These were episodes in his public ministry in 
Galilee, grateful to the heart of Jesus, and doubly 
grateful to some homes in and about Jerusalem, which 
received and welcomed him with blissful and tender 
recollections of his first private and personal ministry 
there. 

5. These points, carefully kept in mind, will reveal 
an organic unity in the narratives, and in the life of 
Jesus : and they will demonstrate a design which 
runs through the whole of the fourth Gospel. They 
will plainly show that the author of it wrote with the 
other three open before him, and with the intent 
always to complement them. The fourth Gospel thus 
becomes an indorsement of the other three. Any 
fabricator would have drawn upon the synoptics, or 
imitated them in some way. But there is not an in- 
stance, as we shall see, where this has been done, and 
the early tradition of the Church — hardly a tradition, 
for it is so early and fresh that it amounts almost to 
personal testimony — has the fullest internal evidence 
of its truth running sometimes into delicate threads 



284 TJ/E FOURTH GOSPEL. \ 



of circumstantial proof — that John, seeing what the 
synoptics had written, approved of it, but wrote a 
fourth Gospel to supply what they had left out of the 
early ministry of Jesus, and what pertained more ex- 
clusively to his Divinity. 



CHAPTER VIIL 

THE LAST MEETING JBY THE JORDAN. 

'nr^HE conflict was over. The forty days of temp- 
-*- tation were accomplished, arid the first dawn- 
ing heaven had broken through his soul with its 
angelic peace, and with the clearness and the fervors 
of noonday. Now that the victory of the inward 
over the outward was accomplished, the Word was in 
last things as well as first, and the Messianic con- 
sciousness was plenary and complete. It is easy to 
imagine what peaceful majesty and command this 
must have given to his personal bearing. 

The " forty days '' of conflict may have been many 
months, for aught we know, of high communings and 
victories. They denote the closing period, " the end 
of every temptation," when Jesus reappeared on the 
banks of the Jordan where John was still prosecuting 
his ministry with a school of disciples gathered about 
him. Some of them evidently had become temporary 
dwellers in the desert, with their tents pitched along 
the shores of the Jordan ; for men were there from 
remote Galilee, seventy miles away, drawn and sub- 
dued by the electric power of the Baptist, and num- 
bered among his personal followers. Among them 



286 ^ THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

were two brothers, Simon and Andrew, and two other 
brothers, James and John, the fathers of whom were 
partners in the fisheries at Bethsaida, on the north- 
eastern shore of the Gahlean lake. PhiHp also was 
there from the same place, also a disciple of the Bap- 
tist. 

John had stirred the country so deeply, that when 
he was organizing a school of followers, some anxiety 
was felt at Jerusalem by the proper authorities as to 
what the issue would be. Who was this wild prophet 
of the Desert, and was he going to subvert the old 
order of things ? A delegation was appointed, prob- 
ably by the Sanhedrim, to go and sift the matter and 
report. They appeared before John, and put him 
under examination. 

John remembers the descending vision which a few 
months before had illumined the desert : but the del- 
egation of Pharisees could not have been much en- 
lightened by the final answer : — 

" I baptize in water unto repentance, for whether 
Jew or Gentile, you all need it alike ; but there is One 
among you whom you do not know ; who is coming 
after me, and whose sandals I am not worthy to un- 
bind, and who will baptize you in the fires of the 
Holy Spirit." 

The day after this interview, Jesus, emerging from 
his solitude, appears a second time before the Bap- 
tist. We infer that the delegation from Jerusalem 
were still present. John sees Jesus coming, and says 



THE LAST MEETING BY THE JORDAN, 28/ 

to them : " There is the man I spoke of yesterday — 
the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the 
world. I know this by tokens which cannot deceive. 
He who sent me to preach and baptize, had said to 
me : ' The Man on whom thou shalt see the Spirit 
descending and resting, is he who will baptize in the 
Holy Spirit' And I have seen it and bear testimony 
that this man is the Son of God." 

The delegation have gone home with their report 
to the Sanhedrim. Jesus reappears the next day, 
from which we infer that his home in the desert was 
not far off. The Baptist, with two of his disciples, 

j;- John and Andrew, are standing together as Jesus 
approaches. " And looking at Jesus as he was walk- 
ing, he said : * See the Lamb of God ! ' And the two 
disciples heard what he said, and followed Jesus. 
And Jesus, turning about and seeing them following 

I him, said : ' What do you desire } And they said to 
him, * Rabbi (which means teacher), where do you 
dwell } ' He said to them, ' Come and see.' So they 
went and saw where he dwelt, and remained with 
him that day. // was about the tenth hour!' 

What marks of truth and nature do we find in this 
description, so very brief and elliptical ! Any ro- 
mancer, at least of these times, would have employed 
pages of rhetoric to express what is here only im- 
plied. The personal appearance of Jesus, the divine 
life flowing in like a peaceful river after temptation 
overcome, making the sphere about him radiant 



288 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

therewith, his majesty of mien in the newly awakened 
consciousness of divine power, giving grace to his 
motions as he walked along, the attractive spiritual 
force which drew the two disciples irresistibly after 
him, so that they followed him to his home in the 
desert, — all this we are left to infer ; but any writer 
at pains to exalt the subject of his story, would have 
described it in full. How the words, '' Lamb of God," 
with the imagery which they evoked, clung ever after 
to the mind of John, we have already seen, and it 
shows how beyond any power of description was his 
first impression of Jesus. 

" It was about the tenth hour." What if it was .? 
Why record a fact sixty years after it had transpired, 
of so little consequence as that they arrived at the 
dwelling-place of Jesus at four o'clock in the after- 
noon t Here is one of the inevitable touches of 
nature. Great and pregnant moments which seem 
the turning points of destiny, or in which the life of 
years seems gathered up, we fix instinctively as a 
date to start from, and such was the meeting of John 
with Jesus. The light of memory thrown back over 
this auspicious hour, was so concentrated and un- 
fading, that the smallest things stand out on its can- 
vas sixty years afterward, and especially that hour 
of the day when they entered the dwelling-place of 
Jesus. 

In the meeting of Jesus at this time with three of 
the other disciples of the Baptist, Peter, Philip, and 



THE LAST MEETING BY THE JORDAN. 289 

Nathanael, we remark that mysterious gift which 
appears frequently afterwards ; the power not only 
of discerning character but of reading individual his- 
tory and turning backward its pages, even the secret 
record of mind and heart which the subject supposed 
locked up in his own bosom. Nathanael, known 
afterwards among the twelve as Bartholomew, was 
now a disciple of John. His home was in Cana of 
Galilee only a few miles from Nazareth. He knew 
nothing of Jesus ; but he had come up to John's bap- 
tism. He had his place of retirement and secret 
prayer. Such places were furnished by the hand of 
nature in the embowering shades on the lower banks 
of the Jordan. 

" The fig-tree — not that kind for fruit renowned, • 

But such as at this day to Indians known 
In Malabar or Decan — spread her arms 
Branching so broad and long, that in the ground 
The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow 
About the mother tree, a pillared shade 
High over-arched, and echoing walks between." 

Philip had been drawn to Jesus, and he hastens to 
find Nathanael and tell him, We have found the prom- 
ised Messiah in Jesus from Nazareth. Nathanael lived 
in the neighborhood of Nazareth and knew it as a 
poor town of no repute. That he had never heard of 
Jesus shows that the childhood and youth of the 
latter had been retired and noiseless. Very naturally 
he is slow to believe that any one of great fame is to 
come out of Nazareth. In the interview with Jesus 
^9 



290 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

it is evident that we have only brief hints or topics 
of the conversation. Nathanael finds to his amaze- 
ment that Jesus already discerns him and reads him 
through, and he asks, '' How came you to know me ? " 
And when Jesus replies, " I saw you under the fig- 
tree, I knew your place of prayer, and the thoughts 
and aspirations and purposes that have hallowed it," 
recounting to him we know not how much of his 
secret history, Nathanael confesses himself convinced, 
and exclaims, " Thou art indeed the Son of God and 
the expected King of Israel/* Jesus promises evi- 
dence to him still more complete : " Hereafter you 
will have prophetic vision of my mission from above, 
in which, as to John at my baptism, its divine agencies 
and attestations will be openly revealed." 

Soon after this Jesus returns to Nazareth, in com- 
pany with three disciples. We infer at least that 
John, Philip, and Nathanael, whose minds had now 
been freshly opened to the evidence of his Messiah- 
ship, went with him to Galilee. John keeps himself 
out of sight here as elsewhere, but he writes after- 
wards as an eye-witness. That Philip went is plainly 
implied ; and that Nathanael went with them is also 
implied, his home being in Cana only nine miles from 
Nazareth. 

The relation of the Baptist to Jesus and the nature 
of the mission of both, are shown in the alacrity with 
which the former gave up his disciples to the latter. 
No founder of a sect, no theologian ever did the 



THE LAST MEETING BY THE JORDAN. 29 1 

same before or since. Unless their mission had 
been from heaven and not from men, we should have 
seen some tinge of earthly ambition, or disappointed 
hope. There is not the slightest, but a burst of glad- 
ness as the Baptist sees his light flickering and going 
out in the glories of the new day. 



PART III. 

THE PRIVATE MINISTRY OF JESUS. 

'f The soft evening cloud, and behind the cloud the great full moon 
bodily I Something so contemplative, so sublime, and so full of pres- 
age that one can never weary of it ! Every time I read John it seems 
as if I could see him before me at the Last Supper, leaning on his 
Master's breast ; as if his angel at certain passages held a light .in his 
hand, embraced me, and spake something in my ear. There is much 
which I do not understand as I read, and John's meaning floats away 
before me in the distance ; but even then when I look into a place 
altogether dark, I have a prescension of a grand royal meaning which 
some day will be revealed to me. Therefore I grasp eagerly at every 
new exposition of the Gospel of John. Alas \ most of them only 
ruffle the evening clouds and the moon behind them is left in peace.*' 

Claudius of Wandsbeck. 



i| 



CHAPTER I. 

THE WEDDING AT CANA. 

WE have distinguished between the private and 
pubUc ministry of our Saviour. The distinc- 
tion must be steadily kept in view if we would un- 
derstand the unity of the four Gospels and see how 
John's lies within the other three. Jesus returned 
from the Jordan to Nazareth in his full Messianic 
consciousness. But he did not proclaim this pub- 
licly nor organize a school of followers. 

His first private ministry was an exploration of the 
mind and heart of Judaism to see if it had any place 
for the reception of the new faith. It is a most in- 
teresting feature in the philanthropy of Jesus that 
its universahty, the absorption of his love for the 
whole race, took nothing from the fervor and tender- 
ness of his private friendships or his love of his own 
people and nation. The hereditary proclivities which 
made him susceptible of temptation from the passions 
and ambitions of the Jewish mind would at the same 
time give to that passion which we call patriotism an 
intenser glow. How intense it was we shall see 
not only from his persistent efforts to save his own 
people first of all, but the depths of anguish when the 



296 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

Jewish mind had been fully explored and revealed 
and the final disappointment came. In this respeoi 
John, even more than the synoptics, reveals the full 
humanity of Jesus ; humanity, that is, in the entire 
range of its affections. 

It will be obvious at once that this private ministry, 
as revealing the heart, mind, and life of the Saviour, is 
quite as important to us and as full of interest as his 
public proclamations of his mission. It will be obvi- 
ous too, that in his private walk and intercourse he 
would not be seen with a band of followers. We 
should rather find him with one or two men, the 
sharers of his most familiar thoughts and tenderest 
personal love. That this was the case, and that John 
was the companion of this private ministry, there is 
most unquestionable internal evidence. The pre- 
sumption is very strong of the truth of a very early 
tradition, that the family of John on the mother's side 
had kindred relations with that of Jesus. 

It will be seen at once why the fourth Gospel 
should differ so' much from the first and second both 
in matter and style. It abounds in reports of collo- 
quial intercourse, sometimes of intercourse so confi- 
dential and sacred that the report of it could not have 
been placed on public record without manifest indel- 
icacy and impropriety until some of the parties had 
passed away. These serve as delicate finger-marks 
in determining the date of the fourth Gospel. 

John, therefore, not only complements, but interlaces 



THE WEDDING AT CAN A, 297 

the synoptics, generally with a clear and beautiful 
consistency. He never in a single instance relates 
what they had reported except to show its essential 
connection with something which they had omitted. 
A special as well as general purpose is evinced in 
the narrative from beginning to end. It must have 
been written by one familiar already with the synop- 
tics, and by an eye-witness of what he relates, for no 
one else could have so dovetailed the narrative as to 
make it fit into theirs so delicately and with such 
marks of reality. 

Jesus returns to Galilee with three disciples, and 
now his private ministry begins. There was a wed- 
ding in Cana, nine miles from Nazareth, and the 
mother of Jesus was there. She would not probably 
have been there unless she had kindred relations with 
the bridegroom or the bride. That the bridegroom 
was John himself cannot be affirmed with absolute 
certainty ; but if any one will take pains to group 
all the facts which bear upon the subject he will 
hardly escape the conviction that this was so ; that 
Salome, the mother of John, was the sister of Mary, 
and that the early tradition is right which makes 
John the bridegroom of this marriage feast. 

Immediately after the wedding Jesus with his 
mother and brethren went to Capernaum on a visit 
of a few days, at or near which place the family of 
Zebedee lived and where John subsequently resided. 
Recall the scene at the cross where Mary and Sa- 



298 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

lome stood side by side, and from which time John 
took Mary to his own home ; recall, too, the special 
intimacy which ever subsisted between Jesus and 
Salome and her two sons, and the family connection 
becomes still more probable. And if John was the 
bridegroom at the wedding he describes, the manner 
in which he has kept himself in the shade is highly 
characteristic of his whole style and method. 

Jesus and his disciples were invited to the festival ; 
that is to say, Philip and Nathanael who came with 
him from the Jordan, the latter of whom was already 
at his home in Cana. John is at pains to tell us that 
here was the first miracle which Jesus wrought. 
The whole scene is of vast significance. What Jesus 
would do when the complete Messianic power had 
come into his consciousness to be ultimated in his 
works, would give shape and color to the new re- 
ligion now descending upon the world. He comes 
from the desert, from long fastings and solitudes, 
from the baptism of John the hermit, bringing three 
of the hermit's disciples with him, and in the natural 
course of human development his religion would 
have taken a tinge of moroseness and gloom. But 
its first office was to fling light and gayety over the 
common paths of life and a charm and consecration 
over its most delightful joys. The "beginning of 
miracles " was an entire breaking away from the 
asceticism of John ; and Christianity at her very in- 
auguration has no leathern girdle, nor raiment of 



THE WEDDING AT CAN A. 



299 



earners hair, nor food of locusts, but comes gar- 
landed with festal flowers and with cups of innocent 
pleasure in her hands. The miracle which changed 
the water into wine was not more wonderful as the 
exercise of new-given power than for its beautiful 
significance. 

The details of the narrative are such as no fab- 
ricator would be likely to invent. The ideals of the 
next age began to have a coloring of asceticism, and 
would not probably have made Jesus the chief figure 
and purveyor at a marriage scene, and such a mar- 
riage scene as was made conformable to the ideas 
and customs of Palestine. We have nothing like it 
in the marriage customs of our freezing occidental- 
ism. It was a prolonged festival of eight days with 
gay processions and rejoicings. Marriage was held 
by the Hebrews in supreme honor. The espousals 
were made early, generally in childhood, that the 
mind and imagination might be kept pure and loyal, 
and the marriage scene was the consummation of 
the fond hopes and aspirations of years. The bride 
in her chamber was decked by her maids and veiled, 
like Rebecca, amid festal songs. When the hour of 
marriage arrived, a procession came with the bride- 
groom, usually in the night and by torchlight, and 
under a canopy supported by four attendants, the 
bride's party exclaiming as they approach, *' Blessed 
is he who cometh ! '' The marriage was consum- 
mated amid the pouring and drinking of wine If 



300 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

the home of the bridegroom was near, the proces- 
sion returned to his house with the bride and her 
maidens, the latter conveying nuptial lamps while 
their rich attire reflected the dazzling lustre. They 
walked under a silken canopy, hence the figure, 
" Thy banner over us is love." Arrived at the bride- 
groom's house, the festivities were continued with 
dance and song. Amid a festal scene like this Jesus 
appears in the first miracle which signalized his 
divine mission to niankind. There was no return 
procession, however, in this case, if our conjecture 
is right, the home of the bridegroom being, not in 
Cana, but in Capernaum, whither his friends attended 
him with his bride, as indicated in the sentence fol- 
lowing, " After this, Jesus and his mother and his 
kinsmen, his disciples (guests at the wedding), went 
down to Capernaum, but continued there not many 
days." 

The spontaneous touches of truth and nature con- 
tained in the narrative are inimitable. How much is 
unconsciously implied in the conversation of Jesus 
with his mother ! Mary must have long seen and felt 
the growing and overshadowing power of Jesus, and 
now more than ever on his return from the Jordan 
after the new immersion into the depths of the Divine 
Love from which he comes beaming forth. Mary is 
no such person as the Catholic Church would make 
her. She has a mother s fondness, with all its fooHsh 
pride. §he in^portunes Jesus to make a display of 



THE WEDDING AT CAN A, 3OI 

his astonishing power. The wine failed, and she said 
to him, " They have no wine." She said a good deal 
more, as the reply indicates. The reply is not harsh 
and cold, as our common rendering would make it, 
though it contains a mild rebuke. The rebuke is not 
in the address, " Woman," which was one of honor 
and reverence, but in what follows, and whose sense 
is, '' Do not be troublesome ; the time has not come 
for me to make a public proclamation of myself*' 
She would have had him make such a blazon of his 
miraculous power as to fill the guests with admira- 
tion, and he refuses. The way in which its benefi- 
cent exercise is veiled and the miracle wrought, 
through private directions to the servants, is in 
keeping with the whole bearing of Jesus during his 
private ministry. Any forger would have shown it 
paraded foremost, and not held in reserve. The way, 
too, in which Mary is introduced upon the scene, and 
a delicate veil thrown over her weakness, so as to 
hide it as much as possible, has the spirit of John in 
every line and word, and his tender regard for the 
adopted mother of his household. Mariolatry began 
very early, but we have no trace of it in her own 
family, and the record herein has one of the plainest 
marks of genuineness. 

The rationale of what we call miracles will elude 
our philosophies, but no more than the whole power 
of spirit over mind and matter, or of the will over the 
body, which we exercise every day and hour. The 



302 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

theory, from the stand-point of supernaturalism, as- 
sumes that, from fhis time forth, Jesus was in open 
communication with both the spirit world and natu- 
ral, and in larger and more vital communication with 
them both than any other person before or since ; in 
more ample endowment of that Creative Word, out 
of which all things were evolved, and of which nature 
itself is only the leaf and flower. That being so, the 
control of his will not only over his own bodily mo- 
tions, but over natural processes beyond his imme- 
diate personality, is not to be reckoned as belonging 
to magic or prodigy any more than ours is when it 
controls the muscles of our frames. One is as mys- 
terious as the other, and the " Word made flesh " 
being once assumed, one is as credible as the other, 
since both are through the influx from the higher 
planes of being into the lower ones, the former, how- 
ever, under conditions more enlarged and compre- 
hending. This " beginning of miracles " attests the 
newly opened divine consciousness in Jesus, and the 
proof thereof is to be found afterward, when in him 
and through him the heavens are nearing the earth, 
and the spirit-world pressing into the natural to make 
the latter more entirely its healthful and beneficent 
body and robe.^ 

1 The six water-jars mentioned in this narrative were vessels kept 
in a back room for the washing of hands before meals. The urgent 
importance of this will be seen from the fact that the Jews in those 
days used at their meals neither spoons nor knives and forks, but only 
their hands and fingers. Dr. Clark writes : *' It is worthy of note that, 



THE WEDDING AT CAN A. 303 

walking among the ruins of Cana, we saw large mossy stone water- 
pots, answering the description given of the ancient vessels of that coun- 
try ; not preserved nor exhibited as relics, but lying about disregarded 
by the present inhabitants as antiquities with whose original use they 
were unacquainted. From their appearance and the number of them 
it was quite evident that a practice of keeping water in large stone 
pots, each holding from eighteen to twenty-seven gallons was once 
common in the country." Travels^ vol. iiL part ii. ch, 14. It will be 
seen how the miracle at Cana was performed in a retired part of the 
house where only the servants could be witnesses of it, and where 
display could be carefully avoided. 



CHAPTER 11. 

THE FIRST VISIT AT JERUSALEM. 

XT OT a great while after the wedding at Cana, 
-^ ^ occurred the annual Passover festival at Jeru- 
salem.' It appealed with stirring associations to 
every Hebrew family, for it was the day of national 
deliverance from Egyptian bondage. It occurred in 
the new moon of the month Nisan, answering in part 
to our month of March. Great care was taken by 
the Sanhedrim at Jerusalem to proclaim the exact 
moment of its commencement through all the tribes 
of Israel. They watched for the first beam of the 
silver crescent in the sky, and the moment it ap- 
peared a man went to the top of Mount Olivet, kin- 
dled a torch, and waved it aloft, backward and for- 
ward through the air. It was answered forthwith by 
torch-lights from the immediately surrounding hills. 
These again were answered from the hills farther 
outward, and so the wave of fire enlarged and ex- 
tended on and on till every Hebrew family had 
greeted the summons. It went south towards Egypt 
till it touched the desert ; westward, till the range of 
Carmel flung it to the sea ; northward, till it blazed 
from Libanus and Antilibanus ; eastward, even into 



THE FIRST VISIT AT JERUSALEM. 305 

Babylonia, till it gleamed on the waters of the Eu- 
phrates. Subsequently, after hostile Samaria had 
broken the wave by false signals, or perhaps by re- 
fusing to give any at all, the torch-lights were su- 
perseded by swift messengers, who went forth to 
proclaim the festival. 

Every Hebrew male, circumcised, of adult age and 
able-bodied, was bound to go up to Jerusalem at the 
Passover festival, either in person or by some repre- 
sentative of the family to which he belonged, and 
offer sacrifice. Women and children were not re- 
quired to go, though they often did ; and so the ways 
converging to the capital were thronged with people, 
generally travelling in groups, and chanting select 
psalms of David. They crowded into the capital by 
the hundred thousand, and it was one of the beautiful 
features of the occasion that private houses now be- 
came public, and sacred to its hospitalities. Not 
every individual of this great multitude was required 
to offer sacrifice in the temple. They organized in 
groups or companies, each company offering its lamb 
or its bullock, for which purpose they were admitted 
into the court of the priests, three companies at a 
time. Vast numbers of animals were required for 
sacrifice, and the festival was the grand market time 
for the shepherds and graziers of Judaea. They had 
their pens and stalls about the temple, and those 
more eager and unscrupulous pushed them into its 
sacred precinct, and invaded its outer court. The 
20 



306 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

court of the Gentiles covered about fourteen acres of 
ground, and it now became thronged with great 
crowds, speaking in various provinciaUsms, with the 
obscene spectacle of bleating sheep and lowing herds ; 
the herdsmen at the stalls chaffering for the best bar- 
gain ; Jewish avarice making the most out of Jewish 
piety. A very lively and promiscuous scene ! 

We must suppose that Jesus had often attended 
these festivals, but John describes his presence at the 
first after his Messianic consciousness had changed 
from twilight into noonday. That John was with him 
seems certain. That Nathanael and Philip were also 
with him seems probable. His first act on entering 
the temple was to purge it of the unclean nuisances, 
— the sheep-pens, the cattle stalls, and the traffickers. 
The wonder is not that they were driven out in con- 
fusion and dismay, but that they had ever been per- 
mitted to come in, and that the police regulations 
had become so lax and sleepy under a decay of rev- 
erence for sacred places and the ideas which they 
represent. To enter into the spirit of the scene we 
must remember that the men knew they had no busi- 
ness there, that the crowds knew it and were glad to 
have them driven out, but had not sufficient command 
to effect it. Jesus assumed the command in that 
conscious power of control over men which had now 
become clearly his. To understand how intolerable 
was the nuisance, it must be remembered that the 
temple in all its courts had a representative signifi- 



THE FIRST VISIT AT JERUSALEM. 307 

cance. It was regarded as copied from the courts 
of heaven, and so again represented humanity itself 
regenerated and made the shekinah of the living 
God. Hence, when the spectators asked him why 
he assumed this lordship over the temple, he made 
immediate reference to the temple of his body about 
to be glorified as the fullness of the indwelling God- 
head, — a reference which, of course, they could not 
understand. 

Skeptical writers stumble at the fact that a similar 
transaction is related by the synoptics, but by them 
at the last Passover of his ministry instead of the 
first ; that is to say, two years later. There is no 
discrepancy. Almost inevitably the nuisance would 
be repeated at subsequent Passovers in the absence 
of police regulations to prevent it, and if repeated it 
would be likely again to be abated under the same 
authority with severer denunciations against the traf- 
fickers as a pack of thieves driving their business in 
a house of prayer. 

Many believed on Jesus at this festival from " see- 
ing hfs miracles." The evangelist does not specify 
them, and the inference is that they were now his 
familiar and spontaneous actions in his walk amongst 
men, and especially amongst the sick, who became 
well in the radiant sphere of his life and under his 
healing hand. His ministry was altogether personal 
and conversational, and the most important and sig- 
nificant incident related was, ~ 



308 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

THE INTERVIEW WITH NICODEMUS. 

John reports the conversation as if he were pres- 
ent and heard it. The first remarkable fact con- 
nected with it is one which we shall find evermore 
repeated and which characterized our Saviour's in- 
tercourse with men. Nicodemus begins with a 
remark which he intends shall be introductory to 
further inquiries. Jesus does not reply to anything 
he had said or was going to say, but directly to his 
inmost thought and state of mind. He searches 
him with a glance and knows that his whole concep- 
tion concerning the Kingdon of God now approach- 
ing, is sensuous and worldly, and no more corre- 
sponds to the truth of things than that of the babe 
before birth corresponds to the world of light and 
colors. A new range of senses must be touched and 
opened ; he must be born into a new world before 
he can know what the Kingdom of God is. Jesus 
wastes no words in exhibiting his credentials or 
appealing to his miracles to authenticate his claims, 
which were sure to be misunderstood. He describes 
the change from a natural to a spiritual state of mind 
as a first essential condition. Nicodemus sits be- 
wildered and suffers the heavenly discourse to flow 
on. We shall fail to enter fully into its import un- 
less we construe it in the light of the scene a few 
weeks before on the banks of the Jordan. When 
Jesus avers that he speaks what he knows and testi- 



THE FIRST VISIT AT JERUSALEM, 309 

fies to what he has seen, he means plainly that he 
holds the truth which he teaches not as opinions, 
and reasonings about them, but as seen in the higher 
range of existence out of time and mortality and 
above their sphere. '' If I tell you of those heavenly 
things you will not believe them, for you do not un- 
derstand the earthly things that represent and image 
them forth. You stick in the letter and you cannot 
rise out of it. And no man hath ascended up to 
heaven but him that came down from heaven, even 
the son of man who is in heaven." Let us not sink 
the strain of this high utterance to a lower key, for 
only by rising to its level we get an adequate idea of 
that state of mind out of which Jesus spake, taught, 
and acted from the first opening of his ministry ; 
which made him speak, not from tradition, but from 
original and inexhaustible fountains, when he sur- 
prised his hearers by his commanding tone, or smote 
his enemies as by electric power. In the language 
quoted, he is not claiming a separate, personal pre- 
existence and personal descent from heaven, — con- 
ceptions we think entirely foreign to the New Testa- 
ment, nor yet is he using an extravagant oriental style 
which we must freeze down into mere rhetoric to find 
the meaning of By " ascending up to heaven '' he 
means, as the. scene at the. Jordan shows, the opening 
of his mind through all its ascending degrees even 
up to the central Light and Life of all, so that the 
heavenly worlds as they exist beyond sense and mor- 



3IO THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

tality lay on his perceptions more unerringly than 
this world of matter lies obvious to the senses of 
men. By " coming down out of heaven," he means 
passing from these high frames into conditions which 
were earthly and mortal, that those immortal realities 
might have clothings and representations on the 
plane of sense and matter. By dwelling in heaveUy 
he means that these high states were normal and not 
exceptional, so that while he had intercourse with 
men through these bodily organs, in his inmost being 
he had open cognizance of the heavenly orders of 
existence, and lived amid their eternal serenities. 
To fail of following Jesus in thought to these celestial 
heights, is to fail of understanding both his character 
and message. But hearing and seeing him as thus 
** coming down from heaven," we shall appreciate in 
some measure his tone of authority ; shall see why 
he never reasons out the truths of his religion but 
simply reveals them ; why he says nothing about 
" the evidences " of immortality, since he lived amid 
its scenery and had only to announce it ; why he 
often speaks of future events as if already transpir- 
ing, including his own death and resurrection, and 
the passing away of the Jewish Church and nation, 
since he lived in the realm of causes whence he saw 
into the heart of things and the germs of all history. 



THE FIRST VISIT AT JERUSALEM, 31 1 

JESUS RETIRES FROM JUD.EA. 

He saw the state of the Jewish mind, and that 
here there could be no general reception of his mes- 
sage, but that it would provoke open and intense op- 
position and hate. Many believed in him seeing his 
miracles. " But he did not trust himself to them for 
he knew them all, and had no need that any one 
should tell him what men are, for he knew what was 
in man." ^ He withdrew, at first, into the country of 
Judaea, away from the glare and notoriety of the city, 
and many resorted to him, were taught by him and 
were baptized by his disciples. This excited the jeal- 
ousy of John's disciples. The Baptist had come over 
from Bethany, beyond Jordan, and was preaching 
and baptizing near Salem on the border of the des- 
ert. By the laws of mere human growth and de- 
velopment, the schools of Jesus and of the Baptist 
should now have become rival sects, with the usual 
envyings and recriminations of ecclesiastical strife. 
That they did not, affords a strong confirmation of 
the averment of the Baptist, that he had seen Jesus 
from a higher than a mere earthly point of view. His 
answer to his own jealous disciples who came to him 
with manifest alarm, is one of the sublime passages 
of history, — " Lo, Jesus is baptizing, and all men are 
going to him," say they. The answer of John is 
found in chapter third, from verse 27 to the end of the 

1 Chapter iii. 23-25. 



312 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

chapter. Expositors have been in doubt where the 
words of the Baptist end and where those of the 
EvangeHst are resumed. We understand this whole 
passage to be the utterance of the Baptist, showing 
the heighth and breadth and clearness of his illumi- 
nation. That alone accounts to us for the grace and 
even exultation, with which a man of his wonderful 
power, with converts flocking to him from every side, 
was content to see himself superseded in the break- 
ing glories of a new day. 

Jesus was making disciples now more rapidly than 
the Baptist. The authorities knew it, and Jesus was 
aware that the eye of the Sanhedrim was bent keenly 
upon him. He knew that his own doctrine was to 
be tenfold more revolutionary than that of the Bap- 
tist, and that his immediate arrest would follow if 
he remained in Judaea. He returned to Nazareth by 
the shortest route, which was through the heart of 
Samaria. The " disciples " who were now with him, 
were probably the same men who followed him from 
the Jordan, and who went up with him to the Pass- 
over festival, — John, Nathanael, and Philip. It was 
a quiet and private journey on foot, made for the pur- 
pose of avoiding publicity or getting away from it. 
It was with two or three intimate personal friends. 



THE FIRST VISIT AT JERUSALEM. 3 13 

CONVERSATION AT THE WELL. 

They passed through Sychar, the ancient She- 
chem of the tribe of Ephraim, lying between Mount 
Gerizim on the left and Mount Ebal on the right, 
both of them clothed to the Hebrew mind with the 
most sublime historic memories ; facing each other 
with a sort of grim horror which contrasts with the 
rich valley between, where the city lies embedded in 
green gardens and olive-grounds, rendered more ver- 
dant by the lengthened shade which they enjoy from 
the mountains. The city is in the heart of Samaria, 
being forty miles from Jerusalem, and as many more 
from Nazareth. This journey of eighty miles, trav- 
elled on foot by Jesus and two or three intimate 
friends, holding converse by the way with persons 
whom they met or with whom they tarried, gives us 
a very distinct and vivid idea of the private ministry 
of our Saviour. Jacob's well was near the city, just 
outside its walls as you approach from Jerusalem. 
It is there yet, near the point where the narrow 
valley of Shechem, which is the modern Neapolis, 
opens into the wider field. It is a permanent land- 
mark, being an excavation thirty-five feet deep out 
of the solid rock. The wells were places of public 
resort, and this one was peculiarly so, being near 
the city walls and on one of the thoroughfares, where 
women morning and evening would be seen coming 
from the city gates, waiting their turn and filing away 
with their pitchers on their head. 



314 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

We know of no composition pervaded more thickly 
with threads of historic reality than the fourth chap- 
ter of John. The air, the scenery, the manners, and 
prejudices of the people, are before us in the spon- 
taneous allusions of the narrative. Every word is 
fragrant with them and with the spirit of history run- 
ning back more than a thousand years. All that can 
be gathered from Josephus is only a verification 
of this chapter. " The journey of our Lord from 
Judaea to Galilee " says a traveller writing from the 
spot, '' the cause of it, his passage through the terri- 
tory of Samaria, his approach to the metropolis of 
this country, its name, his arrival at the Amorite 
field which terminates the narrow valley of Shechem, 
the ancient custom of halting at a well, the female 
employment of drawing water, the disciples sent into 
the city for food, by which its situation out of the 
town is obviously implied, the question of the woman 
referring to existing prejudices, which separated the 
Jews from the Samaritans ; the depth of the well, 
the Oriental allusion contained in the expression ' liv- 
ing water,' the history of the well and the customs 
thereby illustrated ; the worship upon Mount Geri- 
zim, — all these occur within the space of twenty 
verses." ^ The incidental and cumulative evidence 
becomes well-nigh irresistible that the writer of the 
fourth Gospel is an eye-witness of what he records, 
as none else would catch with such precision and 
spontaneity the minute features of his pictures. 

1 Dr. Clarke's Travels^ p. 517. Robinson's Calmety p. 845. 



THE FIRST VISIT AT JERUSALEM, 315 

" It was about noon," an attention to precision of 
date purely incidental, and a further indication of his- 
toric reality. More than all, the conversation with 
the woman is in striking accord with what the writer 
had previously told us concerning the methods of 
Jesus, and his power over the minds of others. The 
woman understands not a word of the discourse about 
" living water," sinking the spirit in the letter all the 
while ; but when she finds not only her own mind and 
soul laid bare under a perfect diagnosis of her spirit- 
ual condition, but the pages of her memory read back- 
ward through all her personal history, she springs to 
the conclusion that not only a prophet but the very 
Messiah has come. It seems probable that John has 
only given us here the heads of conversation, and that 
when the woman said he told her all she ever did, it 
was not such sheer exaggeration as might at first 
appear. She runs back to the city, forgetting her 
pitcher and leaving it, and brings out her acquaint- 
ances to see the wonderful man. He converses with 
them in turn, enters the city along with them, and 
remains there two days engaged in personal inter- 
course with these people, many of whom believed 
" through his own teaching." No '' miracle " is re- 
corded of him here, nor are we led to suppose that 
these Samaritans were initiated very far into a knowl- 
edge of the mysteries of the new kingdom of God. 
But the power of Jesus in sounding the depths of 
the human consciousness, and reproducing the past 



3l6 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

on the living canvas of the soul, and thence speaking 
to its condition, is here brought freshly into view as 
it characterizes his method through all his subsequent 
ministry. It was a power higher in degree than that 
over outward nature or over the physical body, for it 
involved such a knowledge of the hidden past and 
present, that the future about to be evolved therefrom 
lay before him already as in sunlight. 

THE SECOND MIRACLE IN CANA. 

Jesus returned to his home in Nazareth. Before 
his arrival, reports of what he did at Jerusalem had 
preceded him. Of course a great many persons from 
Nazareth and its vicinity were at the Passover festi- 
val, witnessing, not without some complacent pride, 
the wonder and admiration produced there, by one 
from their own humble and despised town. They 
welcome him home. He remains at Nazareth now 
nearly two months, or until the next Jewish festival, 
evidently in the exercise of the offices of his private 
ministry. He revisits Cana, where his miracle at the 
wedding-feast had become known and had placed the 
minds of the people in receptive attitude towards 
him. Herod Antipas was now tetrarch of Galilee, 
with his residence at Tiberias, on the shore of the 
lake, a few miles south of Capernaum. An officer of 
his court was at Cana, who had a son sick at Caper- 
naum. He had heard of the mysterious power of 
Jesus, and besought him to go down to Capernaum 



THE FIRST VISIT AT JERUSALEM, 317 

and heal his son who was dying. " Go," said Jesus, 
"your son is well." Capernaum was fifteen miles 
from Cana. This case in some of its features resem- 
bles so much that of the servant of the centurion nar- 
rated by Matthew that skeptical writers assume that 
Matthew and John give contradictory accounts of the 
same transaction. It is sheer assumption. They 
both belong to a class of miracles distinct from those 
of ordinary healing by the touch of the hand, but no 
more difficult to account for under the action of spir- 
itual laws. In all these instances of the restoration 
of vital power, it is the mind of Jesus flowing into the 
mind of the sufferer, and thence throbbing by a new 
influx of life through the whole physical frame. The 
only essential condition was that Jesus should be 
brought into such relation to the sufferer, that the lat- 
ter could be ensphered within that restoring love and 
mercy. Personal presence, or physical contact with 
words surcharged with electric sympathy, we know 
from common experience are sometimes worth more 
to the patient than any medicine in the world to 
make the languid or freezing currents of life to start 
anew. There was no other magic in the hem of 
Jesus' garment or the touch of his hand, than the 
magic of this creative and healing sympathy. But 
who of us shall say that there is no access of mind to 
mind and of soul to soul except through these fleshly, 
clumsy instrumentalities.? Who shall say this, es- 
pecially of one who " dwelt in heaven " while yet in 



3l8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

the flesh, and thence came down with the divine 
restoratives among the woes and agonies that flesh is 
heir to ? The Spirit knows nothing of space and 
distance as we measure them, and we can well con- 
ceive of it in such power and fullness that distance 
vanishes before it, so that the feeble partitions of 
sense and matter are no hindrance to the healing 
balm of mind over mind, and thence over all the func- 
tions of the body in which it dwells. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE SECOND VISIT AT JERUSALEM. 

THRIFTY days after the festival described in the 
■^ last chapter there was another, called the Feast 
of Weeks, or Pentecost. This also summoned every 
adult male to Jerusalem, and Jesus went up thither 
from Nazareth.^ The inference is that the interven- 
ing seven weeks had been spent in the discharge of 
the benign offices of his private ministry, and that 
the second miracle at Cana was only one of them. 
It is not likely that John was with him during the 
whole of this interval. He would naturally return to 
his home on the lake of Galilee. But he would be 

1 It is a question, however, among commentators whether this sec- 
ond visit related by John was the Feast of Pentecost. Many of them 
make it another feast of the Passover. This is highly improbable for 
many reasons. It would make a whole year interspace the events of 
chapter fifth and those of the preceding ones, with the exception that 
we are told " He remained in Judaea baptizing" after the first Pass- 
over. But the whole connection indicates that this was a short so- 
journ. Again, the Passover festival continued eight days, and, being 
the principal one, is always elsewhere mentioned by name. The Feast 
of Weeks was a shorter one, and would be less likely to be specially 
designated. For these and other reasons, we take this second visit at 
Jerusalem to have been at the Feast of Weeks, conformably with the 
opinions of the earliest fathers, though, it must be confessed, the 
whole question can be decided only conjecturally. 



320 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

likely, on going up to the Feast of Pentecost, to take 
Nazareth in his way, and go in company with Jesus, 
with whom the most intimate of friendships had 
been formed ; and that he did so we have confirma- 
tory evidence in the fact that he alone has told us 
what Jesus said and did at this second visit to the 
capital, and told it with the air and the detail of an 
eye and ear witness. 

The Feast of Weeks commemorated the giving of 
the law from Mount Sinai. It was also a feast of 
prayer and praise, in acknowledgment of the God 
of the harvest, the people bearing the first fruits to 
the temple as an earnest of the looked-for bounty of 
the season. Unlike the Passover festival, this lasted 
only a single day, and required only one night in 
Jerusalem. Nothing could be more picturesque than 
their journeyings to the city. Neighbors and friends 
would form into companies of twenty-four each. 
They lodged in the streets or the open field the 
night before starting, for fear of pollution. This, 
under the soft vernal skies of Judaea, was attended 
with no exposure. On the morning of the following 
day the president of each company called them be- 
times with the salutation, " Arise, and let us go up 
to Zion ! " They set out on the journey preceded by 
a bullock intended for sacrifice, whose horns were 
gilded and whose head was garlanded with olive- 
branches. A person playing on a pipe went before 
them to cheer them on their journey, while bursts of 



THE SECOND VISIT AT JERUSALEM, 32 1 

religious fervor were frequently heard from the peo- 
ple, chanting from the Psalms, " I was glad when 
they said unto me. Let us go up to the house of the 
Lord." They avoided fatigue, travelling only morn- 
ing and evening, and when nearing the city they sent 
a messenger to announce their arrival, whereupon 
some of the priesthood went out to meet them. Each 
carried his basket of wheat, grapes, figs, apricots, 
olives, or dates, waving it anon as his offering to the 
Lord. The baskets of the rich were of gold or silver ; 
those of the poor, of wicker work, fancifully adorned 
with flowers. As they entered the city the artificers 
in the shops rose to salute them while they passed, 
and the inhabitants of the city cheered them from the 
house-tops. Some of the Psalms seem to have been 
written expressly for these occasions, and to have 
been chanted in responses between the people of the 
city and the companies of the tribes crowding through 
its streets towards the temple. 

Such was the Feast of Weeks, which occurred in 
the season answering to our month of May. Jesus 
went up to these festivals, as we learn elsewhere, not 
in one of these companies, but in a private way, and 
now especially during his private ministry would he 
avoid the glare of notoriety. But he would find the 
city alive with the pilgrims, and the courts of the 
temple and the ways leading thereto densely crowded 
with people. 

Only a single incident is related of this visit, which 
21 



322 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

is remarkable as having led on to the colloquy with 
the Jews, and that utterance of more than human 
eloquence contained in the fifth chapter of the fourth 
Gospel, whose single annunciation, says Paley, is 
worthy of all the splendid apparatus of miracle which 
the New Testament records. 

Near one of the gates of the temple was a reservoir, 
probably fed by a stream which ran near the temple- 
walls, and was imagined, for that reason, to have some 
mysterious power of healing. This virtue was sup- 
posed to be intermittent, owing, perhaps, to the inter- 
mittent flow of the waters. Very naturally, porticoes 
had been built around the spot for the reception of 
the sick. Hither the blind, the lame, and the para- 
lytic were in the habit of resorting, each waiting his 
turn to try the virtue of the waters.^ Hither our 
Saviour bent his footsteps. A crowd of diseased per- 
sons, blind and cripple, were here before him. That 
he did not work at once a wholesale miracle, and re- 
store all this withered humanity, and cover it with the 
bloom of health, is sufficient evidence that his power 
was that of mind over mind, and not arbitrary and 
magical, as we are too apt to imagine. He walks 
among these wrecks of men, and selects one who 

1 We understand the last clause of the third verse and the whole of 
the fourth verse to be a gloss, placed originally in the margin, and that 
the original text gives no sanction to the popular superstition respect- 
ing these waters. The passage thus included lacks support from the 
best manuscripts, and has the air of a commentary. 



THE SECOND VISIT AT JERUSALEM, 323 

answers to him with gleams of intelhgence and confi- 
dence. He enters famiharly into conversation with 
him, evidently for the purpose of bringing the man 
within his own interblending and life-giving sphere. 
Through the man's own mind and memory Jesus 
read backward the history of the long thirty-eight 
years of disease and suffering. It was not that this 
case was milder, than the others, and easier to cure, 
physically. It was one of the most obstinate, but 
easier to take hold of spiritually, because Jesus found 
somewhat responsive in the spirit of the patient, so 
that when he tells him, *^ Rise, take up your couch, 
and go home with it," the deep fountains of life 
gushed forth afresh, flowing from within outward, 
and with instant creative energy through the whole 
physical man. 

Other cures might have been performed, but this 
evidently was selected because it served as the text 
of a conversation on the Sabbath, and of an all-reveal- 
ing discourse on death, life, and resurrection. P^ancy 
the long, hard faces of the puritans of the law as they 
meet the man with his couch thrown over his shoul- 
der walking with the rejoicing step of his freshly flow- 
ing energy. " It is the Sabbath-day : it is not law- 
ful for you to be carrying your bed ! " When they 
sought out the author of the cure, and laid a snare for 
his life as a Sabbath-breaker, the answer of Jesus 
bears us, though with few words, into the very heart 
of the Divine Beneficence : " My Father works con- 



324 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

TiNUOUSLY,^ and so do I." He does not stop his 
work on the Sabbath ; for Hfe every moment is a 
fresh gift from his hands ; in the hearts of men that 
beat on that day as on all days, and in all nature, tl\at 
blossoms as brightly on the seventh day as on any 
other. If the Sabbath does not interrupt his mercy, 
why should it mine ? This is the meaning of the 
reply, and nothing could illustrate more benignly the 
new religion now coming direct from the heart of 
God. 

" My Father works continuously, and so do I.'' The 
possessive pronoun is emphatic. Jesus means to say 
that now, in his plenary Messianic consciousness, his 
words and deeds are no longer his own, but the 
unbroken outflow of the Divine wisdom, power, and 
love. This is what offended the Jews. It was not 
that he asserted in general the Divine Fatherhood, 
but that Fatherhood was impersonated in himself so 
unreservedly that it spake directly as of old from Sinai, 
overriding all other authority and sweeping it clean 
away. It was not that he, the finite human being, 
was " making himself equal with God,'' but that in 
him the finite was being held in such complete still- 
ness and abeyance that the Divine wisdom and truth 
were coming forth with unmingled clearness. " Ver- 
ily I say unto you, the Son does nothing of himself, 

1 So the words ews tpri should be rendered. They mean the unre- 
mitting exertion of the Divine governance and preservation for the 
safety and welfare of the creation. 



I 



THE SECOND VISIT AT JERUSALEM. 325 

but only what he sees his Father doing, for what the 
Father does the Son does Hkewise. For the Father 
loves the Son, and shows him all that He does, and 
will show him greater works than these, to your aston- 
ishment." If you are surprised — such is the burden 
of his meaning — that my Word, through my com- 
plete oneness with the Father, has sent life through 
the mind and the limbs of this cripple, much more 
will you be surprised at the wider and profounder 
miracles about to be wrought by it. I see the wrecks 
of humanity strewn all about me, the death and ruin 
of which these blind and withered specimens give 
only the outward form and semblance. And the 
Father commits all judgment unto the Son to discern 
and distinguish this spiritual death and ruin ; — how 
much of it is the sad inheritance of the past, and how 
much of it comes of individual guilt and voluntary 
depravity 1 Verily I say unto you, the hour is com- 
ing, yea, is now come, when those who have gone 
down into this death shall hear the voice of the Son 
of Man, and they who will listen to it shall live. For 
the Father has self-subsisting life, and that life flows 
through the Son, unchanged and continuous, into 
these places of decay and death. Marvel not at this, 
for the hour is coming when not those only who are 
willing to hear my Word shall awake, but when all 
who are in these sepulchres of spiritual death shall 
hear it also ; the grace hardened and impenitent to 
have their quality searched out and shown, and their 



326 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

guilt made blacker in the light of a more intolerable 
day. There is to be both a resurrection of life and a 
resurrection of condemnation. That this last passage 
was a denunciation of the Jewish state of mind, is 
evident both from what is before and after, — a state 
in which spiritual death, ruin, and darkness come 
upon men not as an involuntary inheritance, but un- 
der light and privilege, on whom therefore the light 
will break, not to save, but to condemn. 

This was the last visit of Jesus to Judaea previous 
to the opening of his pubUc ministry. If he had 
once entertained the desire or the thought of in- 
augurating the new kingdom of God at the capital 
its impossibility was now fully demonstrated. Twice 
had he come there after his Messianic consciousness 
had grown to its noon-day power and clearness, and 
twice had they reviled him, rejected him and sought 
to put him to death. At this last visit they charge 
him capitally, first as a Sabbath-breaker and then 
as a blasphemer. With that divine vision through 
which he saw into the heart of things he now reads 
them through and through, and then leaves them to 
themselves. It must have been an enterprise con- 
genial with his fondest desires, perhaps with early 
cherished hopes and imaginations, to begin at Jeru- 
salem, and let the light of the new revelation spread 
in successive waves, till his own people and nation 
were first involved in it and saved by it, and thence 
the outer heathen darkness penetrated by it and at 



THE SECOND VISIT AT JERUSALEM. 327 

last completely illumined. We know, indeed, that 
all the urgencies of a tender and brooding patriotism 
had kindled these desires, and hopes of inaugurating 
his ministry at Jerusalem and first gathering its peo- 
ple, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. 
But this was not to be. His first ministry there was 
tentative and personal, and proved that this was not 
to be. And now in the full opening of his Mes- 
sianic vision the whole future lies before him. The 
path of triumph is not less sure, but it lies across 
Calvary. Henceforth the cross was never out of 
sight. The closing words at this Feast of Weeks are 
a farewell to Jerusalem, as far as these first hopes and 
purposes may have been concerned. There is, even 
in his denunciation, an undertone of deeply grieved 
and disappointed love : " I know you that you have 
not the love of God in you. I have come in the 
name of my Father and ye receive me not ; if another 
shall come in his own name, him ye will receive. 
Think not that I shall accuse you to the Father. 
There is one who is accusing you, even Moses in 
whom ye have trusted. For if .ye had faith in Moses 
ye would have faith in me, for he wrote concerning 
me. But if ye believe not his writings how should ye 
believe my words } " 



CHAPTER IV. 

REMOVAL TO CAPERNAUM. 

I ^HE people of Galilee differed vastly in character 
-*- and susceptibility from those of Judaea. They 
were not such simple children of nature as Renan 
describes them, but bold, hardy, and brave, and with 
the inspiration of liberty thrilling through their veins. 
The best soldiers came from Galilee, and the most 
dangerous insurrections had their origin among its 
hills. In our Saviour's day it had a dense popula- 
tion, but the Jewish element was not the principal 
nor dominant one. Though there were Jewish syn- 
agogues in all the cities and larger towns where 
native Jews and proselytes worshipped together, yet 
Phoenicians, Syrians, and other pagan Asiatics, min- 
gled largely in the population. The northern portion 
of the province was called specially, " Galilee of the 
Gentiles.'' Rough and primitive in their manners, 
in mind, character, and religion they were yet fluid 
under any hand strong enough to impress them with 
the divine signature. 

Towards the northeastern border of this province 
the river Jordan on its course southward, spreads out 
into the Lake of Galilee, described on a preceding 



REMOVAL TO CAPERNAUM, 329 

page. On the western side of the lake the hills 
trend away from it, leaving a plain which curves 
round the water's edge the distance of about eight 
miles. Along this plain and creeping sometimes up 
the hill-slopes, were the five towns already named, 
humble and obscure, but soon to become famous. 
Their names are preserved, but their locality now is 
in part only conjectural. Bethsaida and Capernaum 
were situated towards the northern head of the lake, 
and were fishing villages of considerable thrift. Ca- 
pernaum was not at the water's edge, but climbed up 
the bank and looked away over a prospect of min- 
gled life and beauty, and especially over the lake 
itself, whose surface, except when broken by storms, 
was rippled only by fishing-boats and flocks of swim- 
ming birds ; or, touched and changed by the magic 
light of even-tide, the water seemed to lie on the bot- 
tom of a cup of gold.^ 

All hope of inaugurating the new religion at Jeru- 
salem was at an end. Jesus removed from Nazareth 
and came to Capernaum, making that place his home. 
It is only a conjecture, but under all the circum- 
stances the conjecture rises to strong probability 
that his home was with John or with Salome, John's 
mother, the sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus. 

Here, among these protecting hills and among a 
ruder population, largely heathen, and when Jewish, 

1 The figure of Renan. We follow principally Josephus and 
Calmet. 



330 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

yet sometimes without the iron encasings of Jewish 
bigotry, the new kingdom of God was to have its 
first public proclamation. Jesus proclaimed it to the 
populace till they were shaken by it as the leaves 
of a forest in a mighty wind. He proclaimed it on 
the mountains, by the sea-side to the fishermen in 
their boats, in the synagogues, and to the multitudes 
who pressed around him in throngs. His Word went 
to spiritual natures which were starving, and which 
were born into a new consciousness of life, that 
thence had its outflowing into the lower sphere of 
sense. Paralytics, maniacs, cripples, and blind men 
were restored under his hand, and the dead came 
back to life. Though his home was at Capernaum, 
to which he ever returned, he went through the 
neighboring towns and cities, crossed over the lake 
into Peraea, and made journeys beyond Galilee into 
Phoenicia. None opposed him, except here and 
there a few Pharisees who came as spies and in- 
formers. '* Truly," he exclaimed, on seeing these 
multitudes ready to perish with spiritual hunger, 
" the harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few." 

He organized two select bands or companies, one 
of them permanent, the other temporary, and made 
them the heralds of the new kingdom of grace. 
They could not have entered fully into his thought, 
but his mantle of power rested upon them as they 
spake and acted in his name. The first need was 
not so much truth in the understanding as a quick- 



REMOVAL TO CAPERNAUM. 33 1 

ening power over the will and such cleaving through 
the encasings of sense as to reach the spiritual na- 
ture and bring its wants distinctly and urgently into 
the consciousness. The company of twelve was soon 
found and organized. Six of them had been the 
disciples of the Baptist, and Jesus had met them at 
Bethabara. Two, and probably three of them, as we 
have already seen, had been his personal followers ; 
had been with him in his private ministry in Judaea 
and around Nazareth, and been drawn into the ten- 
der intimacies of personal friendship. Most of them 
dwelt on the shores of the lake, were fishermen, un- 
lettered and rude, but with natures earnest, hardy, 
and glowing with health. Matthew and the sons of 
Zebedee seem to have been men of more education 
and culture than the rest. John, already the com- 
panion of Jesus, had friends and acquaintances at 
the capital. It is remarkable that all the twelve 
were Galileans except one, and that was Judas, who 
was a Jew and who betrayed his Lord. 

Taking into account the time and the occasion, 
the charge of Jesus to these twelve men after they 
had been gathered and organized for their work, is 
most wonderful, and seems more than the language 
of inspiration. The synagogues had become places 
where much freedom of exhortation was allowed. 
Any one who had a word to say was at liberty to say 
it, provided, of course, it did not break the decorum 
of the place ; and it must have been a great relief 



332 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

sometimes from the monotonous droning of the read- 
ers. Into the synagogues Jesus often went to speak, 
and into these he charged his missionaries first 
to go. It shows how deep and persistent was his 
yearning towards his own countrymen and people 
that, notwithstanding his recent rejection at Jerusa- 
lem, where his words fell on their hearts like strokes 
upon an anvil, he will not yet give them up. Still, 
up there in Galilee, they shall have the first offers 
of the divine mercy : " Go not away to the Gentiles 
nor enter any town of the Samaritans, but go rather 
to the wandering sheep of the hous3 of Israel." 
And yet he knows what commotion this will make 
in the synagogues ; and that while a few will welcome 
his heralds and believe, the many will drive them 
away with cursings and bufifetings ; and he fore- 
warns and forearms them against the whole. " Lo, I 
send you out as sheep into the midst of wolves : be 
ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves." 
The other company consisted of seventy men, and 
they went out in pairs. These were not directed to 
go first to the synagogues. They went wherever 
there were ears open to hear them. It is evident 
that these two bands of missionaries evangelized the 
whole of Galilee, and that its stagnant sea of spiritual 
death was shaken into surging waves.^ 

1 Luke, in all probability, was one of the seventy. So say the early 
traditions, and he alone gives the history of their mission, with the 
charge given to them as they were going forth, and he' gives it with 
the graphic details of a personal witness. 



REMOVAL TO CAPERNAUM, 333 

The public ministry of Jesus in Galilee, has been 
described by the synoptics ; for Matthew and Peter 
were eye-witnesses of it, and their personal ex- 
perience was mainly with it. We should hardly 
know from their narrative that Jesus had been much 
out of Galilee. They were not with him ordinarily 
in his private walks. They were abroad on their 
journeyings doing the work which had been com- 
mitted to them, though at stated times " they gathered 
themselves together unto Jesus, and told him all 
things, both what they had done and what they had 
taught." Mark vi. 30. 

It does not come within our plan to follow the 
course of this public ministry, but rather the private 
ministry, as John has described it. The evidence is 
constantly cumulative that the fourth Gospel was 
written by an eye-witness with the synoptics before 
him. 

We will give an instance which comes appropri- 
ately in this place, where the fourth evangelist has 
repeated the first two, plainly to supply something in 
close connection which they had left out entirely. 
Soon after the execution of John the Baptist, the 
people were pressing after Jesus in throngs, some of 
them bent o^i making him a temporal prince. Herod 
had already taken the alarm. Jesus retires from the 
scene by taking a boat with his disciples and cross- 
ing over into Peraea, seeking concealment in an un- 
inhabited place on the sides of a mountain, probably 



334 ^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL, 

at that time covered with forest. But the people see 
the boat put off from Capernaum, and they follow on 
to the number of five thousand, walking on the shore, 
and keeping the boat in sight They seek out the 
place of retreat, and Jesus, soon after coming to the 
spot, finds again a multitude around him. He does 
not repulse or rebuke them, but teaches them still. 
They hang upon his lips till towards evening, when 
the disciples remind him that they are in a desert 
place and without food. The disciples had taken food 
only for themselves. Now follows the narrative of 
Matthew and Peter, of the miracle of the loaves ; of 
recrossing the lake by night, leaving Jesus behind ; of 
the storm which overtook them ; of Jesus coming to 
their relief, walking on the sea ; of Peter rushing out to 
meet him on the water, and sinking in it ; of the calm- 
ing of the storm, and the safe landing again on the 
shore near Capernaum ; of the people bringing their 
sick on beds, when they heard that Jesus had re- 
turned ; and of the multitude who recrossed the lake 
and sought him again. All this is detailed by Mat- 
thew and Peter (through Mark), the latter with lively 
and graphic touches, for he was tetling his own strange 
experience. But we never should have known from 
either of these writers that all this was -only the ex- 
ternal setting and frame-work of the highest truths, 
serving merely to embody and preserve them for all 
ages. We never should have known that the miracle 
of the loaves was merely the text and the occasion of 



REMOVAL TO CAPERNAUM, 335 

one of the most heavenly discourses that ever fell from 
human lips. All that teaching which comprises most 
of the sixth chapter of the fourth Gospel, respecting 
" the bread which came down from heaven," whereof 
if one eat he shall never hunger, and which rises and 
flows on till it unfolds the doctrine of atonement, of 
resurrection from the dead, of a blissful immortality, 
of an interworking providence assuring them that all 
whom the Father gives to the Christ, shall come to 
him, since he will raise them up at the last day, — 
all this was the sermon for which the miracle of the 
loaves furnished the text and the imagery. It flowed 
on until Jesus merged his own personality in the 
truth which he revealed to the world. The scene 
of the cross ever before him, is now transfigured 
and the body to be rent upon it, and the blood to 
be poured out, are taken up and transfused in the 
glowing language of analogy. So completely is he 
identified with his cause, that he acknowledges no 
personal existence, except as the very form and body 
of the truth he brings. " I am the living bread 
which comes down from heaven. Let men break 
my body and eat my flesh and drink my blood. 
Whoever does this hath eternal life, and I will raise 
him up at the last day." 

All this was preached to those people who ate of 
the loaves and were filled, partly on the shore after 
recrossing the lake, and partly in the synagogue at 
Capernaum, close by. Matthew and Peter make no 



336 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

report of it, for the obvious reason that they did not 
understand it, and it did not Uve in their memories. 
They were '' hard sayings " to most of the twelve ; 
and many of the other disciples "fell away" after 
hearing it, for they stuck in the letter and could not 
ascend so high. Matthew and Peter were greatly im- 
pressed with the miracles and all the external phe- 
nomena, and were rapt in wonder by them at the 
time. These they describe with scenic power and 
vividness. But the doctrine of which all else was 
only the type and symbol, and which, in the mind of 
Jesus transcended all the rest in importance, was con- 
gruous with the very mind and genius of the favorite 
disciple who had long shared the familiar thoughts of 
the Teacher, and been drawn up towards the heaven 
in which he lived. John makes mention of the mira- 
cle of the loaves, but goes on straightway to report 
the divine discoursings, for which the miracle served 
only to furnish the text and the imagery. It is 
another illustration of a fact which will meet us con- 
tinually, that the four Gospels are not parallel, but 
convergent, and that the fourth lies at the very heart 
of Christianity. That Matthew and Peter should have 
been impressed mainly with the miracles and the 
physical concomitants, accords with all that we know 
of the character of their minds especially, at this stage 
of discipleship ; that John alone, who had now been 
in intimate communion with Jesus for a whole year, 
should have been drawn up into its spiritual signifi- 



REMOVAL TO CAPERNAUM. 337 

cance, is most natural. It entered deeply into his 
thought, so that he not only reports the discourse at 
length, as if that were more important than anything 
else, but its imagery glows afterwards in the scenery 
of the Apocalypse. Other disciples thought such 
discourse fanatical, and fell off. " How can this Man 
give us his flesh to eat } " Some of the twelve 
wavered. " Will ye also go away } " Only John 
drank in the whole of it, and has given a full report. 
22 



CHAPTER V. 

THE THIRD VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 

T T 7HILE Galilee was moved through its breadth 
^ ^ and depth, and Jesus was drawing the gaze of 
all ranks upon himself, another festival supervened 
which summoned all the Jewish adult males to Jeru- 
salem. The Feast of Tabernacles occurred in Sep- 
tember, and was attended with much peaceful pomp 
and ceremony. It commemorated the sojourn of the 
children of Israel in the desert where they encamped 
in movable tents and tabernacles. It was also a fes- 
tival of thanksgiving for the ingathering harvest. It 
lasted eight days. The streets of Jerusalem and 'all 
the environs were crowded with arbors woven of 
evergreen boughs. These were reared, too, on the 
flat roofs of the houses, so that the city presented the 
appearance of being almost buried in a mighty forest, 
gleaming out here and there through the darkly em- 
bowering foliage. In these arbors the people lodged 
during the festival ; every loyal Jew deserting his 
house for these temporary dwellings. The people 
formed processions, when each held in his hand 
branches of palm, myrtle, and willow, waving them 
and singing hosannas to the Lord of the harvest. 



THE THIRD VISIT TO JERUSALEM,. 339 

The eighth day of the festival was called " the grand 
day," because the rites were specially imposing. 
Close by the temple walls was the fountain of Siloam, 
a spring which bubbled up and became a little brook 
that channeled its way into the Cedron. A pro- 
cession was formed, reaching continuously from the 
fountain into the temple courts, carrying pitchers of 
water, winding round the altar, waving their palms 
and shouting hosannas, pouring the contents of their 
pitchers down at the foot of the altar, and singing, 
" With joy we draw water from the wells of salva- 
tion." The rite was attended with dancing, and the 
festival closed with an illumination of the courts and 
porches of the temple. It was celebrated with so 
much of picturesque pomp that it drew the admiring 
notice of heathen nations. 

There was a pause in the public ministry of Jesus, 
as the people of Galilee were wending their way 
towards Jerusalem to attend this Feast of Taber- 
nacles. Some of his kinsmen urged him to go up to 
the capital, and there proclaim himself, not believing 
that the Messiah was to break upon the world from 
an obscure corner of Galilee. Go, they said, to this 
great feast and publish your claims. Jesus replied 
to them as we construe his words : " You can go 
without me. I am not to celebrate this feast,^ for 

1 John vii. 8. There is some doubt as to the true reading of this 
text, and whether ovk or outtcw should be preferred, i, e., whether Jesus 
said, " I am not going," or " I am not going now.''^ Griesbach adopts 



340 • THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

the time is not yet come for me to be sacrificed. 
You can go in safety ; I cannot. The world does not 
hate you as it hates me." He means, " I am not 
going to keep this festival." Its legal observance 
would have required him to be at Jerusalem at its 
beginning, to go up in one of the processions and 
in a public manner. So he says, I am not going to 
observe this feast ; and he waited till the crowds 
had gone up, and the public ways were still, and 
Jerusalem was in the midst of its rejoicings, before 
he started. He knew that in that city he stood 
charged with two capital crimes : Sabbath-breaking 
and blasphemy. He knew that the stir in Galilee 
had alarmed the Sanhedrim, and that if he appeared 
now in his public character at the capital his arrest 
and execution were certain. So he tells his kinsmen : 
" Go up yourselves, I am not going to celebrate this 
festival." And yet with what unspeakable tender- 
ness does he yearn towards the devoted city ! There 
are his own people and they of his own lineage ; there 
too he has made many disciples during his private 
ministry and among its humbler classes, and they will 
look with longing eyes for him at the' festival. The 
crowds gone, and the ways still, he goes up in a 
private manner, though he comes into the very jaws 
of danger and death. 

Of course he would not appear there as in Galilee, 

the former, and we think rightly. Either way there is no room here, 
as Porph)rry pretends, for impeaching 



THE THIRD VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 341 

at the head of twelve organized followers. The fes- 
tival was half over when he arrived. There is evi- 
dence, as we have said, that John had friends and 
acquaintances in the city, and we infer that during 
this third visit he was there with his Master, as he 
reports minutely the incidents and conversations 
of which he must have been an eye and ear wit- 
ness. 

True enough, the old charge of Sabbath-breaking 
comes up again. The case of the cripple cured at 
the pool of Bethesda is remembered, and there are 
whisperings among the crowd, " Where is He } " He 
ventures into the temple and teaches by personal 
intercourse and conversation, and he is making con- 
verts from among the common people. The Sanhe- 
drim are eagle-eyed, and watch all that is going on. 
They appoint police-officers to arrest him as a Sab- 
bath-breaker, which under Jewish law was punish- 
able with death by stoning. These police-officers 
lurk among the crowd, and wait their opportunity, 
but Jesus discerns the fact, and is acquainted with 
all their wiles. 

Chapters seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth, as far 
as verse twenty-second, of the fourth Gospel, describe 
what took place at this festival and soon after, in the 
intercourse of Jesus with the Jews at the capital. 
He remained after the festival was over, holding col- 
loquies with the groups that gathered about him ; 
mixed companies, some of whom scoffed and caviled ; 



342 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

some of whom were receptive under his teachings, 
but timid and reticent, knowing that an overwhelm- 
ing odium from the ecclesiastical authorities was rest- 
ing upon him. No less than seven of these personal 
colloquies are described by John, who evidently kept 
with Jesus both in his retirement at night and in 
his walks by day. These conversations are exceed- 
ingly characteristic. They are not given evidently 
in the order of time, but they are photographs of the 
temper of the times, of the Spirit of Jesus, and of 
well-known traits of human nature ; and have that 
air of reality which no romance ever succeeds in 
imitating to entire perfection. Sometimes the hear- 
rers and spectators are charmed, and half convinced 
by the speech and bearing of the wonderful man. 
Then they bethink themselves. The Messiah of their 
imaginations was to come in some supernatural and 
unaccountable way : " We know whence this man is. 
When the Messiah comes no one will know whence 
he is." " The Messiah was to break upon us out 
of some splendid supernatural halo ; but we know 
all about this man, and just the place he comes from 
up there in Galilee, and there is no great mystery 
about him." John would not have reported such 
talk as this unless he had heard it. No romancer 
would have done it, bent on glorifying his hero. 

That Jesus, after the full opening of his Messianic 
consciousness, foresaw and forecalculated his own 
death and resurrection, is not inferred from any ob- 



THE THIRD VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 343 

scure intimations which might have been afterwards 
exaggerated and misappKed by his fondly mistaken 
disciples. These form the burden of discourse, con- 
versation, and prophecy, and his forecast of these 
events shapes the whole plan of his ministry. Leave 
out the discourses, conversations, and plans of action 
in which his death and resurrection are presupposed 
and necessarily involved, and there is nothing left in 
the life of Jesus which has any coherence or signifi- 
cance. In this third visit to the capital, his own 
death, and the manner of it which he forecasts so 
persistently and clearly, is a subject of constant refer- 
ence, his mind being full of it, and the minds of his 
hearers being of course utterly incapable of taking in 
the meaning of it. To the men who he knew were 
plotting for his arrest and execution, he said, " I shall 
be with you but a little while longer. You will seek 
me, but you will not find me, and where I shall be 
you cannot come." They thought he was planning 
an escape out of their hands. " What can he mean t 
Will he go to the Greeks and teach the Greeks 1 " 
But again afterward he speaks more openly and ex- 
plicitly, " I lay down my life to receive it again. No 
one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own 
accord. I am commissioned to lay it down and I 
am commissioned to receive it again. This charge 
I received from my Father." Some, very naturally, 
.thought him insane. *' He is mad, why do you listen 
to him." Others, charmed by his words and amazed 



344 ^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. 

by his miracles, are simply perplexed and bewildered. 
" Can a maniac speak like him and cure cripples and 
blind men ? " To suppose that Jesus had not this 
clear supernatural forecast, is to assume that these 
details of conversation were invented afterwards ; 
and this is to assume that some dishonest forger, 
a century after the events, photographed the living 
manners of Jerusalem and the inmost life of Judaism 
with a subtle genius transcending that of Scott or 
Dickens ; and in addition to this put into the mouth 
of one of his characters discourses so much more 
divine than any which ever fell from human lips, that 
they have been bread from heaven to our hungering 
humanity for eighteen hundred years ! 

CURE OF THE BLIND MAN. 

The cure of the blind man, and the incidents and 
conversations which followed thereupon, are transac- 
tions as full of nature as they can hold. Here was 
a miracle right under the eye of the Sanhedrim, and 
in the temple-court, and the people have seen it. It 
will not do to arrest and execute this man unless the 
fact can be accounted for or explained away. They 
appeal to the parents, hoping the parents will deny 
that there was any blindness in the case. They 
evade most ingeniously, and are non-committal : "All 
we know about it is that he was born blind and that 
now he sees.'* 

" Who opened his eyes ? " 



THE THIRD VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 345 

" He is of age, ask him ? '' 

Then follow the cross-examination of the young 
man himself, and his excommunication and the re- 
buke of Jesus to the Pharisees for their own in- 
curable blindness, ascending as usual from natural 
things to spiritual. The miracle is only the nucleus 
of a whole texture of natural events, and the discours- 
ings which proceed from them, which are indissolu- 
bly bound together with the plainest marks of his- 
toric certainty, and the most subtile shadings of 
human character. 

SERMON AT THE POURING OF THE WATER. 

Once, however, at this festival, Jesus broke from 
his reserve and proclaimed himself in tones that 
pierced the crowd and held them in the stillness 
of profoundest awe. It was under circumstances 
where it is hard to conceive it possible that his divine 
eloquence should have been either repressed or re- 
sisted. On the last day of the feast, *' the grand 
day," the long procession was streaming up from the 
spring of Siloam, winding through the courts and 
circling the altar, pouring out their pitchers of water, 
waving their palm-boughs, and chanting, " With joy 
we draw water from the wells of salvation." The 
court of the Gentiles would be thronged with sym- 
pathizing crowds through which the procession 
would wend its way. The rite commemorated the 
miracle in the desert, when Moses smote the rock 



346 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

with his rod and the water gushed out of it. The 
people must have had some perception of the spirit- 
ual significance of the event they were celebrating 
with joyous hosannas. The police-officers were in 
the crowd, watching for what they might deem the 
last opportunity to arrest the Sabbath-breaker and 
blasphemer. But Jesus knew the men, and in his 
hour of divine exaltation was conscious that he held 
them and the crowd at his command. The rock, 
smitten by the prophet's rod and turned to a spring 
for the thjrsting travellers ; Siloam, gushing forth and 
flowing on into the Cedron, become the text and 
imagery of his discourse. "He stood and cried," 
says the record ; implying that his voice broke on 
the crowd above the murmurs and the hosannas with 
such startling power and clearness that it arrested 
them and held them. " If any man thirst let him 
come unto 7ne and drink. Verily I say unto you if 
any one have faith in me his heart shall be a spring 
out of which shall flow rivers of living water." It 
is plain that John only reports the topic and heads 
of discourse, and that it flowed on till it unfolded the 
truths of the new reign of God, and a new dispensa- 
tion of the Holy Spirit. 

The Evangelists do not describe our Saviour's 
manner, from which we infer that he had none which 
drew attention to it. They describe his power by 
the effect his words produced in searching out the 
secret of the soul, and subduing it under a supernat- 



THE THIRD VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 347 

iral awe. This convinced and conquered more than 
my external miracles could do which were only inci- 
dental to it, for it struck on the deeper chords that 
thrilled through the more mysterious realms of con- 
sciousness. So now many believed simply from hear- 
ing his discourse, and only because his words smote 
them as with supernatural power. " Surely," they 
said, " this is the Prophet." 

The seventy judges, which constituted the Sanhe- 
drim, held their session in a room at a corner of one 
of the courts of the temple, and it was not far off. 
The police-officers slink away from the crowd and 
report themselves to the judges. 

" Why have ye not arrested him and brought him 
hither .? " 

" Never man spake like this man." 

HIS EXISTENCE BEFORE ABRAHAM. 

At another of the seven colloquies which John has 
reported on this occasion, they attempted again to 
take his life. It was also in one of the temple courts, 
probably in the court of the Gentiles, under whose 
open porticoes the devotees of the temple were ac- 
customed to assemble and hold converse, as in a kind 
of theological exchange. Here Jesus had gathered 
around him a group of sympathizing friends and 
believers, and was exhorting them to be steadfast. 
" My truth shall make you free," — referring to the 
Roman subjection under which the Jews were chaf- 



348 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

ing, and the higher than civil freedom which was 
now within their reach. But the cavillers were pres- 
ent, and Jesus sees the eyes of the police-officers 
gleaming through the crowd. The cavillers boast of 
their descent from Abraham as conferring a higher 
freedom and nobler pedigree than Jesus could give. 
Jesus charges them with their murderous intent : 
" Ye are seeking to kill me, which Abraham would 
not have done. Your father is the Devil, for you are 
ready to execute his purposes, and he was a murderer 
from the beginning." Then alluding to the eternal 
life which was beyond their reach, he says, " Ver- 
ily I say unto you, whoever obeys my teaching will 
never see death ; " meaning, though you kill the 
body, you cannot touch the life within. This they 
cannot understand. " Abraham died, and the proph- 
ets died, whom do you make yourself.'* " Jesus re- 
plies, " Your father Abraham exulted that he might 
see my day, and he saw it and rejoiced." Sticking in 
the letter they rejoin, " You have not yet reached the 
fifty years which is the average length of human life, 
and have you seen Abraham t " Jesus repKes, in a 
passage which has been made famous by the contro- 
versies which have proceeded from it : '' Before Abra- 
ham was born I am." Notwithstanding the contro- 
versies, we can find but one meaning to it : Jesus is 
claiming that God in a peculiar sense is his Father ; 
and for this reason they are charging him with blas- 
phemy. We must remember that his Messianic 



THE THIRD VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 349 

consciousness is now at its meridian fullness and 
power, and that he claims that he is not speaking 
from himself, nor from any dictates of finite intelli- 
gence ; but that the Word, or the Eternal Reason, is 
speaking continuously through him, as much so as 
when it spoke from Sinai. He claims that his own 
finite personality is lost in these revealing annun- 
ciations, or is held in perfect abeyance. It is not a 
mortal man that is speaking to you, he would say, 
but the Logos himself. It is one with me and my 
Father. Passing into this divine consciousness and 
speaking from it, he uses the first person singular, 
claiming that the Logos has become incorporate with 
his own being and substance. On any other theory 
the language of these discourses is very often utterly 
unwarrantable, and would have furnished the Jews 
with just ground for their charges of blasphemy. 

When he declares, then, " before Abraham was I 
am," he means to say, the Eternal Word from which 
I speak is not like Abraham and the prophets, who 
grow old, or to whom you can apply the measure of 
your mortal years. It has no past, and no future, for 
it is without beginning or end or succession of days. 
To these cavillers, boasting of their ancient and hon- 
orable descent, comes the annunciation : The Being 
who is speaking to you is the Eternal Now, who is 
timeless, — cutting short their driveling logic ; and 
it could not, as we conceive, have been more con- 
cisely and sublimely done. 



350 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

They understand him, evidently now, for they re- 
gard this as blasphemy. They take up stones to cast 
at him, and would have murdered him, but Jesus 
suddenly withdrew and concealed himself, and passed 
out of the temple by a private way.^ 

THE FAMILY AT BETHANY. 

Whither did he go t Luke — who as we have seen, 
must have obtained much that he has written from 
John and his household — has told us of one place 
where Jesus went at this time ; and the fact indicates 
what were his resorts and private communings when 
he withdrew from the strife of men. He sought the 
soothing intercourse of personal friendship in the re- 
treats of social and domestic love. How many of 
these friendships must have been formed among the 
families in and around Jerusalem who had become 
receptive of his Word and believers in his Messiah- 
ship ! They would be mostly if not entirely among 
the common people, who would conceal the fact from 
the respectable dignitaries at the capital. 

1 So we read the passage, John viii. 59, which has been variously 
interpreted. Some render iKpv^rj, "made himself invisible," by 
which the advocates of the genuineness of the fourth Gospel under- 
stand a miracle ; the opposers a trace of Gnosticism. Neither is 
found in the passage, unless by being first put into it by the expositor. 
The latter clause 5L€\dwv .... ourcas, "going through the midst of 
them and so passed by,*' is rejected by Griesbach on external grounds 
as a gloss, as also by some of the best expositors. It probably got 
into the text as a gloss copied from Luke iv. 30. The whole passage 
would read, fairly rendered, " He concealed himself from them and 
passed out of the temple." 



THE THIRD VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 35 1 

About two miles east of Jerusalem, beyond the 
Mount of Olives, near the foot of the mount, and on 
the road to Jericho, was one of these families, evi- 
dently in middle or humble life, to which Jesus re- 
sorted for safety, repose, and the intercourse of per- 
sonal love. Lazarus and his two sisters not only had 
faith in him, but had become endeared to him by 
offices of hospitality and affection. They must have 
been among his earlier converts and disciples, for 
when Luke introduces them to our notice at this 
time, we find their intercourse to be of the most 
sacred and confidential nature. The characters are 
individualized by a few unconscious strokes of the 
pen. Mary sits at his feet, lost to everything beside, 
as she drinks the wisdom from his lips. Martha is 
the more anxious and careful, lest the comfort of a 
guest so honored and beloved will not be attended to. 
Jesus puts them both at ease by a few words char- 
acteristic of his religion and of himself. A delight- 
ful picture of tranquillity and rest after the stormy 
controversies at the temple ! 

So ended the third visit to Jerusalem. These jour- 
neys to the capital were plainly episodes during his 
more public ministry in Galilee, and while his organ- 
ized followers there were achieving their great suc- 
cess. Thither he would return, and at his quiet home 
in Capernaum, and amid a people receptive of his 
Word, receive the reports of his evangelists as they 
came back with tidings of their mission. 



CHAPTER VI. 

FOURTH VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 

ALL this while both the Seventy and the twelve 
were evangelizing Galilee, and probably regions 
beyond its limits. They were amenable only to the 
Roman power, and not immediately under the shadow- 
ing and oppressive authority of the Jewish Sanhedrim. 
We have no intimations that as a body, either of 
these organizations attended upon the Jewish festi- 
vals, or that their work extended within the limits of 
Judaea. But they were to return to Jesus at Caper- 
naum, and bring to him a report of what they had 
done. The Seventy did so, it would seem, about this 
time, when Jesus returned again from Jerusalem and 
its vicinity, and escaped from the snares which were 
there involving him, to this quiet spot among the 
sheltering hills of Galilee. The Twelve, ere this, had 
reported to him ; but the mission of the Seventy was 
more general and more remote.^ 

The whole province of Galilee had been shaken as 

1 "And the apostles gathered themselves together unto Jesus, and 
told him all things, both what they had done and what they had 
taught." Mark vi. 30. "And the seventy returned again with joy, 
saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name." 
Luke X. 18. 



FOURTH VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 353 

from the slumbers of death. The words of Jesus to 
the Jews when he cured the cripple, had become 
verified, — " The time is coming, and is now come, 
when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of 
God, and they that will listen shall live." 

There was a class of men very common in those 
days, called demoniacs. They were not ordinary 
cases of insanity, but cases in which men's voluntary 
powers had been overlaid and possessed, even to the 
bodily organs, as if the unseen world of evil was 
breaking visibly into the world of matter. They 
were the most difficult of all cases to cure, requir- 
ing a stronger and more pervading influx of power 
through the whole organism of mind and body, and 
the disciples were not always equal to the work. 
But the Seventy returned with the joyful report of 
their success : " Even the demons are subject to us 
through thy name." Jesus is rapt into the highest 
ecstasy on finding the success of his Word so wide- 
spread and complete. " I see Satan falling from 
heaven like lightning." "I see the Evil Power, so 
long enthroned over the minds of men, vanish like 
a meteor trailing down the sky." And then con- 
trasting his repulse at Jerusalem with his reception 
among these rude and simple-hearted Galileans, he 
breaks out in a glad strain of thanksgiving : " I 
glorify thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, be- 
cause though thou hast hidden these things from the 
wise and prudent, thou hast revealed them unto 
23 



354 ^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. 

babes." It is impossible to understand this lofty and 
exultant strain, except as we figure to ourselves the 
Saviour escaping barely with his life, from his per- 
sonal ministry at the capital, and seeing the result of 
his public ministry at Capernaum, which shook all 
Galilee from the slumbers of spiritual death. 

Within two years after the removal to Capernaum, 
the change had become so great in Galilee, that the 
authorities at Jerusalem saw the revolution rolling up 
to the capital, and they saw that unless it could be 
arrested, they must inevitably go down before it. 
Unquestionably they were so far right. From any 
possible view which the ecclesiastical powers were 
capable of entertaining, there was now nothing for 
them to do but to put out of the way the author of 
the new movement, which was already shaking the 
ground beneath them. How insecure they were in 
their seats, we shall readily imagine when we call to 
mind the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem at 
the last Passover festival, with a throng of people, 
many of them from Galilee, shouting hosannas and 
strewing his way with palms. 

He must have remained several months in Galilee, 
seeing and hearing the results of his organized min- 
istry and inspiring it with his presence. His next 
visit to Jerusalem was at the " Feast of Dedication," 
which took place in December. This festival did not 
claim any divine authority, nor did it require the 
presence of Jewish believers at Jerusalem. It was 



FOURTH VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 355 

appointed by Judas Maccabaeus as a new dedication 
of the temple and altar after they had been polluted 
by Antiochus Epiphanes ; and the festival down to 
the time of our Saviour had been kept with rejoic- 
ings and illuminations. Jesus is drawn again from 
his work in Galilee. It is apparent, too, that only 
John, his most intimate disciple, went with him from 
Capernaum. 

JESUS WITHDRAWS TO BETHABARA. 

He appears again in one of the porticoes of the 
temple, and holds conversation with the people who 
gather there. But he is more reticent than at his 
last visit, for he knows that the plottings are thicken- 
ing and .ripening, and he will not surrender his life 
till his work in Galilee is complete. He comes to 
the capital now, evidently not so much to make new 
converts there as to hold communings with those who 
already believe on him, and make them strong for 
the trial hour. Observing this reticence and caution, 
the Jews came around him, and said, " How long will 
you hold us in suspense '^. If you are the Messiah, 
tell us plainly } " He reminds them that they are not 
of his fold and will not believe ; that he has come to 
find his own, and does find them ; that no robber can 
pluck them out of his hands, because they were given 
him by the Father, and he and the Father are one. 
This revives the old charge of blasphemy, and kin- 
dles, as with a spark, the rage which since the last 



356 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

encounter had been gathering strength and deter- 
mination. They take measures for his immediate ar- 
rest, and he withdraws both from the temple and the 
city. His purpose in coming hither to strengthen 
those who secretly believe on him, cannot be accom- 
plished in the neighborhood of Jerusalem, and he 
retires to the desert, away beyond Jordan, drawing 
them after him into those profound solitudes. It was 
the old familiar place where John had first baptized, 
where Jesus had made his desert home while his Mes- 
sianic consciousness was coming on with power, and 
where, emerging from the water at John's baptism, 
the heavens up to the central throne, had opened 
upon his mind. Hither he came now, and abode for 
some time ; and how consecrated must the spot have 
been ! And here his own people came to him, and 
gathered around him for those communings which 
could not be had under the scowl of Jewish authority. 
John implies that they continued for some time in this 
delightful intercourse, in those far-off solitudes. '' And 
many came to him who said, John, indeed, performed 
no miracle, but all which John said of this man is 
true. And many believed in him there.'' ^ They were 
choice Sabbatic hours where no police-officers were 
watching in the crowd. It was across the desert, 
some twenty-five miles from Jerusalem. 

1 John X. 40-42. 



FOURTH VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 357 

LAZARUS DIES AT BETHANY. 

But a family of these disciples whom Jesus had left 
Galilee to strengthen and support, was in affliction. 
Lazarus was sick. The sisters know the place of 
Jesus' retreat, and disciples of the neighborhood of 
Jerusalem were going over to Bethabara and return- 
ing. By some of these they sent word to Jesus, con- 
fident that the news would bring him at once to the 
friend whom he loved. He was not ready to leave 
his retirement at once, but lingered there till after 
Lazarus had died. 

It is impossible to enter into this scene, if we re- 
gard the " miracle " which restored Lazarus, an arbi- 
trary display of divine power. It is none the less a 
miracle for being in accord through all its processes 
with the highest and inmost laws of our human 
nature, but whose action is here sublimed and in- 
tensified by a love such as never throbbed before 
through the heart of man. 

Bear in mind that our knowledge of the process 
of death is for the most part a very superficial and 
outside knowledge. Swedenborg says, that the final 
extrication of our immortal being from its mortal 
envelopments, does not generally take place till the 
third day after death has transpired. That it does 
not take place instantaneously, is reasonable in itself, 
and facts are abundant which go to prove it. We 
ought to infer from all the analogies and all the divine 



358 ' THE FOURTH GOSPEL, ^ 

dealings with us, that death is no such change as the 
frightened imaginations of our childhood have made 
it ; that it is not a sudden and violent wrenching of 
the soul from the clasp of the flesh to the giant won- 
ders of eternity. Not so did we come into this world ; 
not so shall we go out of it ; not so are the births of 
nature when in all her embryonic cells she feels the 
troubled life that calls for a new stage of develop- 
ment, when the tender germ is breaking from its 
capsula into bud and flower. Death is birth in its 
ultimation, the final unclasping of the bands of 
nature that held us. There is an interval, longer or 
shorter, between the last streak of our earthly twilight 
and the first gleam of the new morning sky. We 
know this, for hundreds have passed into it without 
touching finally the shore beybnd, and come back to 
this natural life again. It is longer or shorter, accord- 
ing to precedent conditions physical and spiritual. 
It is a total suspension of all the voluntary and invol- 
untary powers. It is where our whole being is bathed 
in the most soothing of Lethean waters. Instances 
are reported where this interval has been prolonged 
through several days. In what we call death the 
spell of total silence is laid on all our fluttering pulses, 
lest any of our struggles and outcries might hinder 
the divine process of resurrection. The mother's 
caress, when she stills the waihngs of her infant on 
her breast, represents but poorly the unequaled ten- 
derness of the Divine Father when He hushes his 



FOURTH VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 359 

babes to sleep, that their waking in the air of immor- 
tality may be orderly and serene. 

It is also true that the process of death is pro- 
longed and even postponed by the clinging sympa- 
thies of friends. This law of sympathy sometimes 
acts disastrously, lengthening out the last agonies 
when those we love ought to be given up on their 
part and on ours, with an unreserved resignation to 
the Divine Will. That there may be a sympathy so 
divinely strong as to postpone the final extrication of 
the spiritual body from the natural, is certainly con- 
ceivable under the same law of mental and spiritual 
action. 

Bear in mind, too, that the sympathies of Jesus 
were so pervasive and strong that space and dis- 
tance often vanish, and the sorrows and pains of 
those who were miles away, are drawn up into his 
heart, and healing power sent forth to restore them. 
Analogous cases have been known where hearts, sun- 
dered by wide spaces and even by ocean waves, have 
so throbbed into each other as not only to beat con- 
sciously together, but to impart some knowledge of 
their mutual joys and sufferings.^ We get hereby 
some dim intimations of what our mysterious nature 
might be without the clogs and limitations of sense, 
and of what the nature of Jesus actually was when 
sense was becoming the transparency of the spirit 
within. 

1 The case of the Buckminsters, father and son, will occur to some 
of our readers in this connection. 



360 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

HE IS RAISED TO LIFE. 

In conceiving the resurrection scene which now 
follows, the EngHsh reader must carefully eliminate 
from it the idea suggested by our word "grave." 
The tombs in the vicinity of Jerusalem were cham- 
bers excavated in the sides of limestone rocks. 
Around the sides of the chamber were placed stone 
tables, and back of these were niches, or narrow cells, 
sunk farther into the rock. The tables were first oc- 
cupied with the corpses, and when the tables were 
full, the bodies were laid away in the cells beyond. 
We must dismiss the notion of coffins and of our 
modern funeral paraphernalia. The bodies were em- 
balmed, but the balming varied according to the rank 
or vanity of the deceased. The usual way was to 
anoint the body with odoriferous drugs, and swathe it 
with linen bands ; and so prepared, it was laid tenderly 
away upon one of the tables at the side of the sepul- 
chral chamber, the door closed which opened laterally 
into the recess, and a stone rolled against it. 

We are now prepared to understand the resurrec- 
tion scene at the tomb of Lazarus. The friendship 
of a soul like that of Jesus, the personal ties that 
held others in the embrace of his love, are a most 
essential element in the interpretation of this whole 
chapter, — a chapter which quivers with a pathos, as 
fresh, when we read it now the thousandth time, as 
if the whole scene were enacted but yesterday. We 



FOURTH VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 36 1 

must think of the mighty power, even of our poor 
human affection over those who are near to us when 
struggUng in the grasp of death ; how it holds them 
in the body and will not let them go ; how some- 
times, after the eyes are closed and the pulses are all 
still, and the shroud has been put on, affection will 
hold them in ties that cannot break, and in some 
cases well certified, has divined the fact that the 
spirit was still there, and called it back to life. 
Think, then, what the power of the Saviour s love 
must have been when acting under like conditions ! 
The miracle began two days before, and it was a 
miracle of all-knowing and all-conquering sympathy. 
Jesus was twenty-five miles off beyond the Jordan, 
when Lazarus sickened and died. He was so rapt in 
communings with his followers, and so intent in pre- 
paring his flock against the wolves that would scatter 
them, that he remained there two days after the 
afflicted family sent for him. But in heart and spirit 
he is at Bethany also, and knows the progress of the 
disease by those throbs and disturbances, which a 
heart both great and tender, feels along its hidden 
chords, and which draws up the sufferings of others 
into itself How naturally he discerned, or rather 
felt the hour when all was over ! " Our friend Laza- 
rus sleepeth and I go to wake him." He would not 
call it death, for he was still conscious that he held 
him in his power and held him to this world in the 
mighty embraces of his love, and only for the dull 



362 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

perceptions of his disciples he says, ^' Lazarus is 
dead." When all this is kept in mind, the scene at 
the tomb almost ceases to be a wonder, for it is 
hardly strange that the spirit came back to its con- 
sciousness in the flesh, when it had been held to this 
world and within its fleshly organism by sympathies 
so divinely strong. We cannot read patiently the 
sermons of the commentators on the words "Jesus 
wept," as if here was something unaccountable. 
How perfectly do they bring him before us, burdened 
with the feelings caused by drawing all the pains and 
sorrows of the family, and the dying man into him- 
self, pent up before, but now convulsing his breast 
and brimming over in drops of tenderness ! And 
how entirely in keeping is the scene that follows, 
which we are let into in a way that no forger would 
ever have thought of! As the tenant of the tomb 
rises from the stone table on which he had been 
lying, and struggles with the linen bands that im- 
pede his movements, and the lookers-on are fixed in 
wonder and awe with no offer of assistance, Jesus, 
who alone was self-possessed, says to them with a 
wave of the hand toward Lazarus, " Loose him and 
let him go." 

Then the characterization of the narrative is so 
plainly unstudied and undesigned as to render it 
morally certain that the whole scene is real and not 
imaginary. How perfectly, though incidentally, are 
the two sisters individualized ! It is Mary and not 



FOURTH VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 363 

Martha who sits in the most retired part of the 
house, given up to tender sorrow, and does not know 
that Jesus is coming. It is Martha and not Mary, 
still " cumbered with much serving," who sees his ap- 
proach and rushes out to meet him. One repeats 
after the other, the same words which they must 
have said over and over together. It is Martha and 
not Mary who makes the coarse remark respecting 
the state of the body. Any forger or romancer could 
have imagined a resurrection scene, and we have 
abundance of them in the legends of the saints. No 
forger or romancer of these times, or of any times, 
could have made the central fact the heart of a nar- 
rative like this, threading the whole body of it with 
veins into which beats the finest life-blood of our 
human nature. 

A late writer objects to the prayer at the tomb 
as dramatic, in the clause "because of the people 
that stand by I said it, that they may believe that 
thou hast sent me." If it was dramatic, then all 
prayer is except secret prayer, for all other prayer 
is specially "for the sake of the people that stand 
by," they being supposed either to join in it or be 
brought more directly under its influence. It is to 
be presumed that John has here given only the 
summary of what Jesus prayed for, and which was 
mainly for faith on the part of the people who were 
with him. His desire was that they might not stu- 
pidly wonder at the miracle he was about to work, 



364 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

but be helped by it to an apprehension of the Divine 
doctrines which he taught. 

On a careful study and review of this resurrection 
scene, I want language to express the conviction of 
its historic certitude in all its particulars. The nar- 
rative is beyond the highest reach of art, in those 
delicate touches of nature which are plainly uncon- 
scious, and therefore the indelible marks of reality. 
A forger would not have brought Jesus to the grave 
" weeping," nor would he have described a scene of 
such thrilling import without betraying some effort 
to be dramatic, nor without weaving in elements in 
disharmony with the naturalness and tenderness of 
the scene. It is objected that such a miracle as this 
could not possibly have been omitted by the synop- 
tics. The objection is futile. Whenever Jesus ap- 
proached Jerusalem he came under the frowns and 
threatenings of the authorities. To come up with 
twelve organized followers, would have been madness. 
He never did, except at the fatal Passover, foreseen 
and intended to be the last. But he knew how many 
hearts and homes were yearning towards him in and 
aboiit Jerusalem, how much they needed strength, and 
how soon they would need consolation. These more 
private visitations give us gleams far into the more 
interior life of Jesus; and whoever reads the fourth 
Gospel with care, must see that they are described by 
an eye-witness who keeps himself out of sight Let 
the reader note carefully the time of the resurrection 



FOURTH VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 365 

scene at Bethany. Jesus had come up privately to 
Jerusalem for the last time before the fatal Passover ; 
he had escaped for his life and gone over the Jordan 
into the desert ; he had drawn after him disciples 
from the city, and was communing with them there ; 
he goes back to Bethany to raise up his dead friend, 
though against the remonstrance of those disciples 
who fear he will be arrested ; he leaves immediately 
after, and returns to Galilee by an unfrequented way, 
where we find him again with the twelve. It is pretty 
certain that the twelve were not with him at Bethany ; 
it is exceedingly probable that John would be there, 
and taking the whole evidence, we think it morally 
certain that he was there, and that his pen has de- 
scribed the scene. 

JOHN INTERLACES THE SYNOPTICS. 

We have observed how constantly he supplements 
the synoptics and fits into them. Sometimes the 
interlacings are exceedingly delicate, and where he 
disagrees with them in details, the disagreements are 
confirmatory evidence of genuineness. We cannot 
avoid the conclusion, that we have an instance of this 
in the history of the resurrection scene at Bethany, 
and one of a very remarkable kind. The characters 
are introduced in this way : — 

" Now a certain man was sick named Lazarus of 
Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha." 

Then we have this explanatory sentence, thrown 



366 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

in parenthetically : " It was the same Mary which 
anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped his feet 
with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick." 

Why this reference to Mary as one whose deed was 
already famous ? We cannot mistake the prominence 
here given to her. Martha is only known as Mary's 
sister, and Lazarus as Mary's brother, and she is 
spoken of as if her good deed had somewhere else 
been described without being credited to her by 
name. " This Mary was the person who anointed the 
Lord with precious oil." Turning to the synoptics 
we find this deed of tender friendship described by 
Matthew and Mark in a strain of the highest com- 
mendation, with the assurance of Jesus that its fra- 
grance should yet fill the whole world.^ But the name 
of the woman thus highly praised is kept back, for 
when Peter preached, and Mark and Matthew wrote, 
she was probably living. How natural for John writ- 
ing later, when he came to speak of Mary to say, 
"This is that person who anointed the Lord with 
precious oil," in tacit reference to the well-known 
and remarkable eulogium which the first two evan- 
gelists had recorded. 

But this fragrant deed of Mary, John himself de- 
scribes afterwards ; and as we are persuaded, with a 
delicate reference to the narratives of Matthew and 
Mark. We have it in the fourth Gospel on this 
wise : — 

1 Matt. xxvi. 6-13. Mark xvi. 3-9. 



FOURTH VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 367 

** Then Jesus six days before the Passover came to 
Bethany, where Lazarus was whom he had raised 
from the dead. And supper was made for him there, 
and Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at 
table with him. Then Mary, taking a pound of pure 
oil of spikenard, very precious, anointed the feet of 
Jesus and wiped them with her hair, and the house 
was filled with the perfume of the oil. Then said 
one of the disciples, Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, 
he who was about to betray him : ' Why was not this 
oil sold for three hundred denarii, and given to the 
poor.' This he said, not because he cared for the 
poor, but because he was a thief, and had the money- 
box and what was put in it was in his hands. Then 
Jesus said, ' Let her alone ; she has kept it for the 
day of my burial. The poor ye have always with 
you, but me ye have not always.' " ^ 

This is the same scene which Matthew and Mark 
describe. The details and the language ascribed to 
the interlocutors are such, that it cannot possibly be 
any other. The time is the same, it being just before 
the last Passover, when all the disciples attended 
him, and when his nearing death so filled his contem- 
plations, that the ointment had the odor of the tomb. 
The place is the same. Why then has John here de- 
parted from his rule, and told over again the story of 
the synoptics. Plainly, because their narrative had 
inaccuracies which John would naturally wish to set 

1 John xii. 1-8. 



368 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

right. John's memory would be more minutely accu- 
rate than Peter's or Matthew's, for John had intimate 
relations with the family at Bethany ; had been there 
again and again with Jesus, while Peter and Matthew 
had not. They tell us vaguely that it was at the 
house of " one Simon." How fondly does John 
recall the scene, in order to name the guests and put 
in the names of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha! But 
Matthew had said " the disciples,'' and Mark still more 
generally " they " rebuked the woman for wasting the 
ointment, and that it was poured upon the head of 
Jesus. John says with indignant accuracy, that it 
was yudas Iscariot who uttered the rebuke, and that, 
not because he cared for the poor, but because he was 
a thief and kept the money-box, and wanted to put 
something into it ; thus exonerating the other dis- 
ciples. He is careful even to give all the additions 
of Judas, and make him stand out from all the rest, 

— "the son of Simon, who was about to betray him." 
He also says with more minuteness and as a more 
interested observer, that it was the feet of Jesus 
which Mary balmed, — the feet of the weary traveller, 

— and that she wiped them with her hair, thus giving 
to the incident all its touching significance. 

These corrections of the other narratives so deli- 
cately done are indubitable marks of truth and genu- 
ineness. No fabricator would have thought of sup- 
plementing the synoptics in this way. He would 
have dealt in generalities, instead of going down into 



FOURTH VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 369 

details which photograph the scene with such sharp- 
ness of outhne as to correct the more vague and in- 
accurate statements of observers, who must have wit- 
nessed it with an interest not near so tender. He 
would have had no motive to depart at all from the 
synoptics in such matters as these, but every motive 
to keep in harmony with them. But how fondly has 
John supplied these details in scenes over which his 
memory was brooding, putting in all the names of 
the dear family which the others *had left out ! And 
while he corrects them with sharpened accuracy he 
puts in the hated name of Judas with a tone of his 
ancient anger and scorn. The evidence is irresistible, 
because so perfectly artless, that the author of the 
fourth Gospel is writing of scenes and characters 
endeared and long familiar, and to which Matthew 

and Peter were comparative strangers. 
24 



CHAPTER VII. 

FIFTH AND LAST VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 

T T E went back to Galilee, not publicly, but by way 
^ ^ of the desert, lingering for awhile at a town 
called Ephraim, on the borders of the desert, there 
drawing his Judaean disciples to him in his last pri- 
vate ministry. Returning again to Galilee, his inter- 
course with the twelve from this time forward seems 
toned with an indescribable pathos in a constant en- 
deavor to prepare their minds for the impending 
blow. The synoptics describe the teachings and 
events of this interval with graphic detail. We have 
them in Matthew, from chapter xvi. to xx. 28. Now 
Jesus speaks constantly of his death at Jerusalem, 
for he knows that the plot there for his destruction 
is fully prepared and ripened. Now occurred the 
scene of the transfiguration, which drew up his most 
intimate disciples to a vision of immortality and of 
the spiritual body, which was above the power of 
Roman crucifixion. Now were given the most ur- 
gent lessons of self-sacrifice, to cutting off the right 
hand or plucking out the right eye, that the spiritual 
body might be kept whole and not perish in hell. 
Now come the most impressive rebukes of all their 



FIFTH AND LAST VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 371 

sensuous ideas and ambitions, telling them again and 
again that the baptism in his kingdom is one of blood, 
and the cup to be drank is the cup of trembling. The 
next festival is that of the Passover. He is going up 
to it, not privately, but with his whole organized 
band, and he knows what the result will be. 

A question will naturally arise here. Why did 
Jesus go up this last time to the capital, when he 
knew he was walking into the jaws of death 1 The 
vicarious theology, of course, has a ready answer; 
but it is too technical, and it does not satisfy us. 
And yet it is the husk of a truth most profound 
and comprehending. Jesus might have avoided 
this martyrdom, but it could only have been by the 
abandonment of his work, and by escape from Pal- 
estine. He was no longer safe within its borders. 
The revolution beginning in Galilee had rolled up to 
Jerusalem, and under it, pervading the minds of the 
masses, till the Sanhedrim felt that the whole ground 
was tremulous beneath them. And yet it is plain, 
from any human point of view, that the movement, 
left to itself at this stage, would soon have subsided, 
and nothing would have come of it. Neither the 
twelve nor the masses which they had moved upon, 
had as yet any adequate conceptions of its nature. 
One of two things was inevitable now, — failure or 
martyrdom. Even on the well-known principles of 
human nature these had become the fatal alternatives. 
Death at Jerusalem, in the lowest view that could be 



372 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

taken of it, was a sublime testimony to the doctrines 
of self-abnegation and sacrifice which had made up 
the very body and substance of our Saviour s dis- 
coursings. To escape out of Palestine would have 
been to turn them into empty words ; to " go up to 
Jerusalem" now, was to render them fragrant through 
all ages with the inspirations of a Life which for the 
first time was to make the most splendid visions of 
moral perfection a fixed reality on the earth. There- 
fore when Peter remonstrated, saying, "This shall 
not be unto thee," Jesus turned upon him with what 
seems at first a sharp rebuke, " Go from my sight, 
thou Satan ! thou wouldst cause me to fall, for thou 
carest not for the purposes of God, but for that 
which pleases men." ^ 

But from a point of view vastly higher than this, 
death had now become an adamantine necessity. He 
had taught his disciples the highest truths of heaven, 
but they had entered scarcely deeper than their 
memories. Jesus saw what none of his disciples 
could, that death was only the reverse side of resur- 
rection ; and, that accomplished, he should have 
access to their minds on the purely spiritual and 
immortal side, with an influx of power that would 

1 This, however, was not a rebuke of Peter, or even addressed to 
him. Jesus evidently felt a temptation assailing his own mind, sug- 
gested by Peter's words, — a temptation to avoid death and abandon 
his cause. The words are aimed directly against the tempter, as they 
were in the early scenes of temptation, ''Get thee hence, Satan," 
and Peter, unconscious of blame, is lost sight of. 



FIFTH AND LAST VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 373 

stream through their memories -and thence through 
their whole being, making the truth which now lay 
cold and dead to burn hke fire, and melt them down 
and purge their dross away. It was necessary, 
then, that Jesus should now die, in order that " the 
law might be satisfied," if we mean by law not an 
abstract or arbitrary rule, but those eternal principles 
of -being through whose fulfillment alone our fallen 
humanity could be laid hold of, and renewed, and 
lifted up to the Divine embrace. 

This interval, apparently of about three months, 
seems to have been passed in Galilee in these com- 
munings with the twelve, who had accomplished their 
mission in that province, and returned to Jesus with 
its tidings for the last time. Matthew and Peter, 
through Mark, make full reports of these last months 
in Galilee, for they were conspicuous actors in them. 
John says nothing about them, for the good reason 
that they had already been narrated. The Passover 
at hand, they go up now in company, and there is no 
longer any effort on the part of Jesus to elude the 
toils of his enemies. The hour has come, and it 
would be talking very tamely to say that he meets it 
with courage. Courage is required when we walk 
partly blindfold into danger. Jesus, from his height 
of transfiguration to which the three disciples were 
drawn up for an hour, but where Jesus was standing 
serenely all the while, has a forecast of the track of 
history, including his death and resurrection and 



374 ^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. 

the destruction of the Jewish state, and the new 
kingdom of God rising on its ruins and radiating to 
the end of the earth. All this was before him, and 
must account to us for the entire change of tone and 
manner, now that " the hour is come," and which are 
a challenge flung down from aloft to the authorities 
at Jerusalem to do their worst, and fulfill their hour 
of darkness. 

The Passover festival took place from four to five 
months after *' the Feast of Dedication " at which we 
last saw Jesus in the temple, soon to be driven from 
it and from the neighborhood of Jerusalem. Not 
then was he ready to die. His followers were to be 
strengthened for coming events, his organized twelve 
were to be gathered around him again in Galilee for 
a similar purpose. All this has been done, and Jesus 
makes ready to go up to Jerusalem openly and eat 
the Passover with the twelve. They seem to have 
gone, not through the heart of Samaria, but through 
the desert, or near it, skirting its western border, and 
entering Judaea by way of Jericho. At the beginning 
of the journey, Jesus took the twelve apart, telling 
them explicitly that he was going up for the last time, 
and was now to be crucified. They fell behind him 
in that perplexing dread produced partly by his words 
and partly by the coming calamity whose shadow al- 
ready involved them. Before reaching Jerusalem, 
however, his way was thronged with people. Doctors 
of the law came to dispute with him. Mothers came 



FIFTH AND LAST VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 375 

with infants in their arms to get his blessing upon 
them, making their way through the ring of doctors 
for this purpose, showing how deeply and fondly the 
heart of the masses had been stirred, and how it 
throbbed at his approach. Blind men stationed them- 
selves by the way, and cried for his healing power as 
he passed. As he neared Jerusalem, he applied for 
an ass, and rode upon it, probably to prevent the 
crowd from thronging him.^ He makes no effort to 
repress the enthusiasm which breaks spontaneously 
from the lower ranks of people, and comes up around 
him in shouts. They strew his path with palm- 
branches, and throw down their garments for him to 

1 Strauss has this criticism on this passage, as near as we can quote 
it from memory. Matthew mistook the passage in Zechariah, which 
really speaks of only one animal, and should be rendered, " Behold, 
thy King cometh sitting upon an ass, even a colt the foal of an ass.'' 
Matthew thought there were both an ass and her colt in the case, and 
so he makes the disciples bring two, and makes Jesus ride on both, — 
showing that the whole is a myth put in to fill out a Jewish preconcep- 
tion. The writers of the second and fourth Gospels, not falling into 
Matthew's blunder, mention only one animal, — the colt. This is a 
very subtle and ingenious criticism. But the author of the first Gos- 
pel, who probably wrote it in Hebrew, would be quite as likely to 
understand Zechariah, either in the Hebrew or Septuagint version, as 
Dr. Strauss would. The inference most natural to our minds is, that 
Matthew mentions two animals because he describes the fact as he 
saw ity albeit the prophecy names but one. They found the colt with 
the dam, and so both were brought ; but as Jesus rode only one of them, 
the garments being placed upon the other, Mark and John only men- 
tion the colt. Matthew does not necessarily imply that Jesus rode 
both, and one reading of Matthew of considerable authority (eV avrhv) 
makes him ride only one. 



3/6 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

ride over. Little children even join in the throng, 
and cry, " Hosanna in the highest ! " and he enters 
Jerusalem, not as a malefactor under sentence of 
death, but as a hero returning from his conquests. 
He must have known what all this portended. He 
must have known how these acclamations would 
strike on the ears of the ecclesiastical authorities. 
" All the world has gone after him," they said. The 
conclusion, in their logic, could not be avoided. 

This entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, strikes us at 
first as having an air of eccentricity, and it is just one 
of those incidents which, when narrowly scanned, are 
found in such close and logical connection with other 
events and circumstances, that its first apparent sin- 
gularity avouches its reality the more. The evange- 
lists put it forward as if it were solely from a predeter- 
mination to fulfill an old prophecy, but incidentally 
and unwittingly they disclose quite other reasons, 
and reasons which show that it was the wisest and 
most natural thing which Jesus could have done. Re- 
member that all Galilee had been deeply moved, and 
was crowding in long procession after him to the capi- 
tal. Another throng comes out from the city to join 
it. What was the thought which ran through the 
crowd from mouth to mouth } Luke haa indicated it : 
" Because he was near Jerusalem they thought that 
the kingdom of God would immediately appear." 
They thought he would put himself at the head of his 
followers, as the temporal Messiah, commence his 



I 



FIFTH AND LAST VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 377 

reign with Jerusalem for his capital, and subdue the 
world to himself by miraculous physical power. He 
must ride, into the city, or be overrun by the throng. 
But he chooses the humblest way. He comes not 
with horses and chariots, but sends for a beast of bur- 
den never used in war. The ass, though of more 
spirit and mettle in Oriental countries than the one 
which goes by the same name amongst us, was never- 
theless used only in peaceful industry. The act was 
plainly intended to proclaim distinctly to the Jewish 
authorities, and his own followers as well, that he was 
no insurrectionist, and that his kingdom was to 
extend only by peaceful methods. He was really 
fulfilling the prophetic words quoted by Matthew 
from Zechariah. 

Why does John repeat the story .? Because he 
alone sees its connection with the miracle at Bethany. 
The raising of Lazarus some months before must 
have excited curiosity and wonder in and around 
Jerusalem. Any writer bent on making a sensation 
with his readers, would have enlarged upon this, and 
brought multitudes to see the risen Lazarus, and talk 
with him, and see the man who had called him back 
from the tomb. There must have been much of this 
kind of excitement, supposing the event to be real ; 
but John gives us an idea of it naively, and in a few 
lines. Jesus enters Jerusalem riding upon the ass ; 
and John too makes prominent the prophecy which 
was fulfilled, charging himself and the other disciples 
with stupidity for not understanding it sooner, while 



378 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

rather incidentally he tells us that a throng went out 
of the city to meet the throng coming in, " because 
they had heard that he performed this miracle." 
Thus while the evangelists make the entry to Jeru- 
salem appear like an eccentricity by their mystic 
theory concerning it, they supply incidents uncon- 
sciously which show its natural connections, and give 
it the indubitable marks of reality. 

It is remarkable that while the synoptics up to this 
time tell us little or nothing of what occurred at Jeru- 
salem during the ministry of Jesus, they now become 
very full, and report minutely and with graphic power, 
showing that while before this they had only been 
eye-witnesses of the work of Christ in Galilee, after 
this they are eye-witnesses of the events at the capi- 
tal. All the twelve are now there. John's narrative 
and that of the synoptics now flow on together. Still 
the narratives are not parallel. Though John nar- 
rates much in common with them, he is supplement- 
ing them all the while, and introducing us to an in- 
terior range of fact and of experience to which they 
were partial or total strangers. Still the disciple 
nearest to the Lord was a sharer of his thoughts, his 
works, and his perils, to an extent which they were 
not ; and we shall find that while Jesus now had his 
public work to do, and his messages to deliver, among 
which was the denunciation of woes against the ene- 
mies of his truth, he had also his private and personal 
ministries, and that they belonged to the inmost 
ranges of his tenderest love. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE NIGHT OF THE LAST SUPPER.^ 

^T 7'HEN we read of the private communings of 
^ ^ Jesus with his disciples, at the home of the 
sisters in Bethany, or in the depths of the desert be- 
yond the Jordan, or again in the secluded places "near 
Ephraim," the heart naturally yearns to be drawn into 
the confidence of those quiet sabbatic hours. What 
did Jesus say to them to strengthen their souls and 
bring them out of the shadows of doubt, distress, and 
fear which were falling upon them from the clouds 
which thickened and grew black around them ? What 
did he say to them to prepare them for the impending 
woe ? We know tolerably well what he said. The top- 
ics of discourse at the Last Supper, in which he 
sought to draw his disciples upward towards the se- 
rene heights on which he stood, must have been those 
which he urged repeatedly upon his followers in his 
last personal ministry with them, whether near Jerusa- 
lem or in the seclusion of the desert. His oneness with 
the Father that they may be one in Him, and with 
each other ; his promise of the Comforter ; his exhorta- 
tions to steadfastness as he described the trials that 

1 See the Appendix A. 



380 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

awaited them ; his prayers to the Father in those 
states of exaltation in which '' the Son of man was 
glorified,'* that is, when the Spirit within so irra- 
diated the whole outward man that the body lay upon 
the soul as a garment of light ; his rebukes of all 
personal ambition and rivalry with lessons of self- 
forgetfulness and self-sacrifice ; these are the topics 
of the strain at the Last Supper which runs through 
five consecutive chapters, unparalelled for its celestial 
beauty. John must have heard it often, varied in its 
adaptations, as he attended Jesus privately in those 
personal ministries on the approach of the final catas- 
trophe ; and this doubtless is another reason why he 
was the sole reporter of it. He had heard it so often 
that it dwelt in his soul as a strain of heavenly mu- 
sic, one note of which called up all the rest. 

In his narrative of the tender scenes of the Last 
Supper, John supplements the synoptics, and in one 
instance fits into Luke's account with such delicate, 
connections and shadings that they become the 
strongest of circumstantial evidence. Apart, there 
are things not easily understood. Compare them, and 
we have the interblendings of a picture recognized at 
once as a perfect copy of nature and reality. 

The washing of the disciples' feet, mentioned by 
John alone, seems in his narrative to be ill-timed and 
out of place, and a piece of downright eccentricity. 
Jesus in the midst of the Supper, rises from the table, 
girds himself as a menial, takes a basin of water, goes 



THE NIGHT OF THE LAST SUFFER. 38 1 

round and washes their feet, and that done returns 
to finish the meal. No wonder they were surprised, 
and remonstrated. Turn to Luke, and we find the 
reason of it. The disciples were engaged at table in 
a most unseemly dispute of personal rivalry, and the 
symbolical act of Jesus was an interruption and hush- 
ing of this noise of tongues. They were immediately 
shamed into silence and humility, and it was to the 
state of mind thus prepared and made receptive that 
the discourse of those five wonderful chapters was 
addressed, immediately afterward, and out of which 
the prayer must have been breathed : " I in them 
and thou in me that they may be made perfect in 
one, that the world may believe that thou hast sent 
me." 

Some one has undertaken to criticize the prayers 
reported in these chapters, as partial and lacking the 
comprehensiveness of humanity, because Jesus in- 
cluded principally his own disciples. "I am pray- 
ing for them ; I pray not for the world." But his 
whole purpose in gathering them about him was to 
create an organism to receive and embody his Spirit, 
and which after he had passed from sight should em- 
body it with progressive power and be the fulcrum 
on which Omnipotence would raise humanity itself 
to the Divine embrace. " As thou hast sent me into 
the world, so I send them into the world. Nor do I 
pray for these only, but for those who may believe on 
me through their teaching, that they all may be one, 



382 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee." Never was 
prayer more comprehending and efficacious, for it re- 
quires the breadth of the world and the remaining 
ages for its fulfillment. 

The discoursings and colloquies of these five chap- 
ters were not all at the Last Supper. Chapter xiv. 
closes with the words, " I shall not talk much more 
with you. The prince of this world is coming, and in 

me he has nothing in common with him Arise, 

let us be going hence ! " He knew that the police of 
the Sanhedrim were on his track, and to prolong his 
intercourse with his disciples somewhat farther he 
walks with them to the Garden of Gethsemane. On 
the way the contents of the three following chapters, 
commencing with the beautiful figure of the Vine 
and its Branches, seem to have been uttered famil- 
iarly in the ears of the eleven, with short prayers and 
communings with the Father as he saw the great 
crisis at hand. 

As we come to the closing scenes, three very gen- 
eral facts are most strikingly manifest : that the third 
and fourth Gospels give us a whole congeries of 
events running into graphic detail chromatic with 
the inmost life of Jesus, which the first two Gospels 
leave out altogether ; that John is an eye-witness of 
what the others were not, and that Luke reports 
things upon John's authority. 

The open triumphal entry into the capital, with 
the retinue from Galilee shouting hosannas, hastened 



THE NIGHT OF THE LAST SUPPER. 383 

the catastrophe. But it was finally precipitated by 
that discourse of Jesus in the temple courts, re- 
ported by Matthew alone, where members of the 
Jewish priesthood had gathered as usual around him 
to question and cavil. The style of speech, on the 
part of Jesus, is no longer colloquial and reserved. 
It rises to sustained and continuous discourse, and 
though inspired with tones of grieving mercy, is never- 
theless the most awful denunciation that ever rang 
on the iron casings of the human heart and con- 
science. As he closed with the words, " Lo ! your 
house is left you deserted ! " and went out of the 
temple, knowing he was never to enter it again, it 
must have sounded like the last sentence of doom 
through its corridors. The quick determination of 
the plot, the brutality and maddening rage at the mock 
trial and the crucifixion, follow in natural sequence, 
but else were hard to understand. 

The scene in Gethsemane is given by each of the 
Evangelists. But Luke and John become minute 
and graphic in the extreme. In the last grievous 
temptation, when the flood of agony became over- 
whelming, they alone unveil to us the inner sanctu- 
ary. Luke, elsewhere vague, here becomes exact, 
telling us that in the terrible wrestling, when Jesus 
took the three disciples apart to watch with him, he 
had withdrawn from them " about a stone's throw ; " 
that is, he was still within sight and hearing. He 
alone describes the sweat falling thick and heavy 



384 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

like drops of gore, and the appearance of the strength- 
ening angel.^ The contrast between the exaltations 
of the Last Supper, and the abyss of woe in Geth- 
semane, is striking indeed, and it is alleged by object-' 
ors that other martyrs have exhibited a greater meas- 
ure of fortitude. Such critics lose sight of the fact 
that fortitude does not consist in meeting suffering 
without sensibility, but in spite of it, and that the 
largest and the deepest natures rise the highest and 
sink the lowest through the ranges of bliss and woe. 
Susceptibility to pain is in exact proportion to the 
wealth, abundance, and fineness of the material it 
consumes. An American savage would meet death 
by slow torture almost without emotion, because his 
nature lies proximate to the animal ; but he would 
judge very poorly of the anguish whose nerves run 
not through the animal tissues alone but through the 
textures of a humanity so angelic and divine that its 
sympathies drew up into itself the sufferings of a 
race. The alternative is now upon Jesus in more 
awful force than in the temptations of the desert, — 
the sacrifice on the morrow, or escape out of Judaea. 
The latter is still within his choice, for the twelve 
legions of angels, if invoked, will guard him invisibly 
through the danger and out of it. But the sacrifice 

1 We do not understand Luke to say that the sweat itself was 
blood. The word oxrel, " as it were/' implies the contrary, so that 
Mr. Norton's objection to the passage vanishes, for the external evi- 
dence against it is inconsiderable. 



THE NIGHT OF THE LAST SUPPER, 385 

is already chosen, and the anguish of it is not physi- 
cal merely. It is heart-anguish the most terrible, for 
his own people and nation are to put him to death, 
whom he has yearned to gather under the wings of 
Mercy, as a bird gathers her brood, but whose sun 
has now sunk behind the thunder-clouds soon to go 
down in a sea of blood. 

It is one of the beneficent and compensating laws 
of suffering, that it becomes shorter as it becomes in- 
tense, and hastens the sufferer into the sweet refuge 
of death. The death of the cross was a prolonged 
agony of days and weeks in ordinary cases. The rob- 
bers crucified with Jesus were alive on Friday even- 
ing, and unless the execution had been hastened by 
other means, would have lived much longer, whereas 
Jesus expired at the end of three hours. It aston- 
ished the insensate soldiers, even as the agony in the 
garden does the commentators ; but both the suffer- 
ings of Gethsemane and Calvary come under that 
great and merciful law which governs all suffering, 
that Life, which is the highest and most finely organ- 
ized, is most fiercely rent and lacerated by it, and for 
that very reason its organism soonest gives way and 
refuses to be the inlet of pain, but shuts it off through 
the insensibility of death. The process began in the 
garden, where the sufferer exclaimed as he fell under 
it, My soul is exceedingly sorrowful even to the verge 
of death, — and only three hours of agony remained 
for the cross. 

25 



386 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

It would appear that while Jesus fell prone under 
this load of anguish, only a stone's throw from Peter, 
James, and John, they were heavy with sleep.^ This 
should not surprise us when we remember that it was 
now far into the night. It is not implied, however, 
that none of them were witnesses of this last and 
most overwhelming of all the Saviour's temptations. 
The sleep seems to have been fitful and broken, and 
heaviest on the part of Peter. John, who describes 
the scene most vividly, if Luke's narrative be his, 
entered most fully into its meaning, and knew the 
influx of Almighty strength represented by the help- 
ing angel. John alone tells us of the awe which came 
over the minds of the poUce, who at first fell back as 
Jesus appeared before them, declining to arrest him 
as once before, till he told them to do so and let his 
disciples go. 

1 It will be observed, that when Jesus returns to rouse the disci- 
ples, he addresses Peter only. 



CHAPTER IX. 

CALVARY. 

THE place of crucifixion must have been just 
north or northwest of Jerusalem, not far beyond 
the city walls, on one of the mounds which rise up 
from the undulating surface, and which probably on 
account of its shape was called the " Skull." A throng 
of spectators followed the cohort of soldiers who had 
the prisoners in charge. Each, according to Roman 
custom, was compelled to carry his own cross. While 
the two robbers were bearing theirs, Jesus fainted 
under the burden, because the sufferings already en- 
dured had prostrated his strength, and the soldiers 
compelled a man from the crowd to carry it after 
him. 

In this crowd two classes of persons are to be 
distinguished. There were the enemies of Jesus 
whose rage was now to be glutted in full. These 
followed near at hand and gathered close around the 
cross, feasting their revenge upon sight of its ago- 
nies. But the personal friends and disciples of Jesus 
followed afar off, keeping in sight but hovering at a 
distance, probably on some neighboring mound that 
commanded a view of the scene. In this far-off 



388 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

group were friends which had come from Galilee. 
Among these are four devout women, — Mary the 
mother of Jesus ; Mary her sister, the wife of Cleo- 
pas ; Salome, the mother of James and John and a 
kinswoman of these sisters ; and Mary of Magdala. 
Probably most of the twelve were also in this far-off 
group. They dispersed and fled when Jesus was 
arrested, but we infer are included among the friends 
now hovering cautiously and tremblingly within dis- 
tant view of the crucifixion. Close about him Jesus 
sees only the brutal soldiers, now leisurely sitting down 
by the cross as a guard, and the more cruel men who 
pass by with scoffings and gibes. But there is one 
exception. John is there. He was the only one who 
did not " forsake and flee " at the arrest in Gethsem- 
ane, except to follow close on the heels of the police 
and come in with them at the mock-trial. He was 
in the procession that'kept close to the soldiers when 
Jesus was led to execution, and now he stands alone 
under the cross where the storm of hate is fiercest 
raging, and he gives us again an inside view ; the 
lines of light athwart the blackness, the undertones 
of mercy within the storm. He alone of the disciples 
hears the prayer of the sufferer : " Father, forgive 
them for they know not what they are doing." We 
do not think this refers any more to the savage sol- 
diers who drove the nails, but could not understand 
how piercing was the torture they made, than to the 
men who set them on, passing to and fro with fiend- 



CALVARY. 389 

ish glee. But John does not long continue there as 
a solitary disciple. Three persons of that group 
looking on afar off, break away from it and come 
nigh, drawn by the awful fascination of the scene. 
These are the mother of Jesus and her sister, the 
former leaning upon the latter and clinging to her 
with maternal anguish. The third is one who had 
been healed of disease, Mary of Magdala. She, too, 
ventures nigh, and all three find their way to the 
cross and come up and stand with John. Jesus looks 
down upon them ; and now follows the tender collo- 
quy in which He commits his mother to the care of 
the favorite disciple. There are writers who dis- 
credit this account, because they think the women 
could not have endured such a sight. Strange that 
any man who ever had a mother could write such a 
criticism ; could believe that one mother in ten thou- 
sand would have kept afar off and not come nigh for 
the last benedictions and farewells, or could be ig- 
norant of the fact that in such hours as these the 
gentlest natures are the strongest, and that woman's 
affection is the mightiest power on earth, and in- 
spires her courage after it has failed from the souls 
of men. The alleged discrepancy here between 
John and the synoptics is altogether specious, for it 
is only another instance where John interlaces them 
with such touches of nature as to make the harmony 
more pervading and complete. 

There is another colloquy at the cross, which is 



390 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

reported by Luke alone, but which, without reason- 
able doubt, comes originally from John, who stood by 
the cross and heard it. Two men called " thieves " 
were crucified with Jesus, and to one of them Jesus 
gives the assurance, " This day shalt thou be with 
me in Paradise." This passage, we think, has been 
signally misinterpreted ; and a supposed discrepancy 
has been alleged between Luke's (John's) narrative 
and Matthew's. 

We get a very inadequate notion of these men 
called "thieves," if we are thinking only of those 
who steal their neighbor's goods in peaceful and 
civilized communities. The word is rendered well 
enough, though it includes, further, the idea of rob- 
bery or violent seizure of the property of another. 
Who these men were, or to what class they belonged, 
there is not much doubt from the circumstances 
of the case. Josephus describes them. The Roman 
provinces, of which Judaea was one, were placed, as 
we have said, under proconsuls and governors, whose 
main object was to gather a revenue from the people 
from which to enrich themselves, and then return to 
Rome and live in luxury and splendor. These exac- 
tions were sometimes exceedingly oppressive, — were 
excitements to insurrections, concealments, and re- 
prisals. Some of the more daring and reckless among 
the oppressed would band together and seek the fast- 
nesses of the mountains. There they would conceal 
their goods, and thence issue by stealth and make 






CALVARY. 391 

reprisals on the power that oppressed them, — per- 
,haps make assaults on the unwary traveller. They 
sought the wild coverts of Judaea, leading a life of 
irregular warfare, always objects of dread to the Ro- 
man governors, and subject, when arrested, to execu- 
tion under Roman law. They answered in part to 
the clans of the Highlands, the Dreds of the Great 
Swamp, or the John Browns of our border warfare. 
Probably Barabbas was one of these men, for whose 
release in the place of Jesus the Jews clamored at the 
trial. They might include men of a vast range of 
character, from the very worst to men of natural hu- 
manity, pursuing a good end by unlawful means, and 
roughened and made grim in the irregular strife. 
They would be very likely to come from the rude 
heathen population of Galilee. 

Two of these men have been arrested, and are to 
be executed under Roman law. Amid the darkness 
and convulsion, Matthew describes the demeanor of 
both the robbers, — how, in the frenzy of pain, both 
joined with the Jewish scoffers, and taunted the Di- 
vine sufferer with the invitation to come down from 
the cross. But when we open Luke and see the 
spectacle from John*s point of view, a new scene 
opens upon us, and one of so much moral beauty 
that it flings a gleam of sunshine across the horrors 
of Calvary. It is a scene of penitence, forgiveness, 
and triumph over death. One of the malefactors, 
Luke says, railed on him, but the other rebuked him, 



39^ T^'IE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

saying, " Dost thou not fear God, seeing thou art in j 
the same condemnation ; and we justly, for we re- 
ceive the due reward of our deeds, but this man hath 
done nothing amiss ? " 

On the surface there is a discrepancy between 
Matthew and Luke. It is only apparent, and because 
the harmony is so profound and complete. 

When the crucifixion commenced, the two robbers, 
thinking Christ was a malefactor, joined the Jewish 
rabble, and reviled him. Matthew tells us so much, 
and leaves us. But John takes us farther inward. 
The crucifixion proceeds through the weary hours 
from morning till afternoon. Within the sphere of 
grosser vision, within the tumult around and the an- 
guish of mortality, one of the malefactors sees Christ 
as he is, himself as he is, hears him and understands 
him, and turns to him for salvation and pardon. How 
all-revealing is the hour ! — passed the sphere of car- 
nal perception, passed the maddening paroxysms and 
the torture of the nails, passed the sound of passion 
and hate that were raging around the cross into that 
still haven where all is calm and clear, under the 
nearing immortality and the subduing spirit of the 
Lord. In that undertone of indescribable tenderness, 
which few could have heard who stood amid the storm 
of rage and the wagging of heads, he says, " Lord, 
remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom." 
And Jesus replies, "To-day shalt thou be with me 
in Paradise/' 



1 



CALVARY. 393 

This narrative affords no ground for the belief that 
a prevaiUngly bad Ufe can terminate in a happy and 
triumphant death. But the narrative does give us 
some prevision of the inversions of the spiritual world, 
where judgment is not according to appearances, but 
according to intrinsic realities. What a contrast have 
we here between this wild bandit from the mountains 
and the Jewish Sanhedrim, which condemned and 
crucified the Lord ! — they the most outwardly re- 
ligious men, grace-hardened in long years of light 
and privilege ; he garbed in the grimness of strife, 
but preserving a more honest heart and more suscep- 
tibility to the Divine mercy : they the heirs of all 
God's revelations, whose light they never followed ; 
he the heir of small light and privilege, following, very 
possibly, righteous ends by unlawful means. We get 
some idea of that state of being to which this tends, 
and in which it consummates, where splendid exter- 
nals and grim and horrid coverings are both re- 
moved, and man's hidden and intrinsic life is brought 
out and robed anew. How much susceptibility to 
the Divine mercy is preserved under heathen dark- 
ness, to be awakened under the dawning light and 
grace of immortality, and how much of impenitence 
and inhumanity have been confirmed under church 
privilege, till the Divine grace rebounds from it as 
from a rock of flint ! 



CHAPTER X. 

THE REAPPEARINGS OF JESUS. 

THAT Jesus reappeared to his disciples after his 
crucifixion, and that his ministry was continued 
to them with tokens of yet more searching and irre- 
sistible power, we may regard as the fundamental fact 
of the New Testament history. The language and 
the very life-plan of Jesus prophesied of his resurrec- 
tion, and the whole subsequent history refers back to 
it and takes its significance therefrom. Leave this 
out and the whole record falls into an inexplicable 
jumble and loses its unity, and Christianity, as a 
transforming power in human affairs, is a most un- 
accountable phenomenon. 

But it is not strange that a fact of such vast signifi- 
cance should have been apprehended by the first dis- 
ciples with considerable variations, and that after a 
short time had elapsed there should have been tradi- 
tions and rumors concerning it which were very im- 
perfect reflections, if not absolute refractions of the 
great reality itself It was a fact partly natural and 
partly spiritual, partly that is in both worlds, and lia- 
ble to be misapprehended. We should distinguish 
the statements of eye-witnesses whose testimony is 



THE REAPPEARINGS OF JESUS. 395 

first hand, or nearly so, from those which are plainly 
legendary ; and we should distinguish the pre-ascen- 
sion appearances, or those of the " forty days," from 
the post-ascension which continued for some time 
afterwards. 

There are reasons, as we have shown above, for 
regarding the twenty-first chapter of the fourth Gos- 
pel as an appendix not written by the same hand, but 
subjoined after John's death. 

We have two other witnesses at first hand beside 
John, — Matthew and Paul. The genuine Mark 
closes with the eighth verse of the sixteenth chapter, 
the last twelve verses having been proved by the best 
evidence, external and internal, to be additions made 
by a later hand. So that the genuine Mark only 
gives us the second-hand reports of the women. 
Luke is a second-hand witness, though nearly the 
same as first hand if, as we believe, he writes from 
John's authority. 

Paul testifies to a general fact of the utmost signifi- 
cance. According to him, the reappearings of Jesus 
to his disciples were of a very frequent and familiar 
character, and a subject of common remark with each 
other. He appeared to Peter and James individually, 
and twice to the twelve together, as John has related : 
facts which Paul must have derived from the Apostles 
themselves in his intercourse with them ; and he ap- 
peared to five hundred brethren at once, most of 
whom were alive when he wrote. Elsewhere Paul 



30 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 



refers familiarly to the same general fact. Not long 
after the vision from whose overpowering glory he 
was led blind into Damascus, a man came to him on 
an errand of love, saying that Jesus had appeared to 
him and given him the message. Paul says nothing 
of the women who saw the angels, but appeals to 
Apostles and to living men too multitudinous to call 
by name. The genuineness of Paul's record the most 
skeptical have never called in question, and it enables 
us to understand why the evangelists have not dwelt 
more at length upon a fact which must have been of 
universal notoriety among the early believers in Pal- 
estine, and therefore did not need repetition. 

Among all the witnesses at first hand there is en- 
tire agreement, some supplying what others omit ; 
but the general fact rises and rounds upward in con- 
gruity, and in its stupendous import under that blend- 
ing testimony, both on the natural and the spiritual 
side. None of them tell us that Jesus ate with his 
disciples after his resurrection. All those accounts 
are legendary, and they might easily date from the 
fact that he appeared to them, as he most naturally 
would, at those sacred social hours when they ate to- 
gether with tender memorials of his love. None of 
them tell us that they saw angels ; these accounts all 
come at second hand from the women, and we believe 
them to have been true, with just such variations as 
would be made under the excitement of fear and sur- 
prise, and which the evangelists have most faithfully 



THE REAPPEARINGS OF JESUS, 397 

recorded as they heard them. All of the accounts are 
totally inconsistent with the idea that Jesus rose in 
the unchanged natural body, for then he would have 
lived over with them the natural life as Lazarus did 
with his family at Bethany and been subject to death 
again.^ He only appeared at intervals of time, never 
to the Jews who had crucified him, always to his 
friends and followers when their minds were held 
under a supernal influence and awe. But up to the 
time of his ascension he appeared to them in natural 
form, as one who had been crucified, and showed them 
his hands and his side, as if in accommodation to 
their carnal conceptions and sensuous faith. Two of 
these reappearings are recorded by John, an addi- 
tional one by Matthew ; all three were to the eleven 
assembled privately together, Thomas only being ab- 
sent from one of them. This is the sum of the direct 
testimony. Paul supplies the added information that 
the reappearings were not confined to the eleven, 
but were vouchsafed to multitudes who were living 
when he wrote. 

Such were the pre-ascension appearances. But 
after forty days and after the ascension, there were 
other reappearings, and they were made with a more 
overwhelming power and from amid insufierable splen- 

1 We say the unchanged natural body without denying that Jesus 
rose in the natural body. What the change is, from natural body to 
spiritual, is a subject beyond our grasp till we know better what matter 
itself is. On this point read the chapter on the " Transparencies of 
Nature," in Part IV. 



398 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

dors. All the communications to Paul were of this 
kind. They were not from one who wore a body 
which had been crucified, but from a glory above the 
brightness of the sun at noon-day. He reminds us 
again and again that his intercourse and communion 
with this glorified Being was so frequent and of such 
a nature, that he received from him direct the whole 
body of Gospel truth which he was to preach, so that 
he had no need to consult the other Apostles or confer 
in any way with flesh and blood. He was their peer 
as much as he would have been by following Jesus 
through the track of his earthly life. He gives the 
best evidence - of what he says in the broad Catholic 
Christianity, replete with the life and inspiration of 
its author which glows through his pages. 

John's record in the Apocalypse is similar. The 
post-ascension appearances were from amid the same 
overwhelming glory out of the midst of which he 
received his message to the constellated churches. 
The reappearing which Matthew describes, though 
not post-ascension, was yet, as we infer, near the close 
of the forty days, and as one period was melting into 
the other. Not now as at the first two meetings does 
he stand among them showing them his wounds. 
He appears far above them and they fall on their 
faces doubting and afraid, till he comes near and 
assures them, giving them his final charge with the 
declaration, '' All power is given me in heaven and 
on the earth." 



THE REAPFEARINGS OF JESUS. 399 

Such is the report of the eye-witnesses, made with 
some variations, but the variations are mutually and 
strongly corroborative. But there is evidence of an- 
other kind. It is the common consciousness of the 
first Christian Church and the first Christian age of 
the new Power moving upon human nature and rapidly 
transforming it, as the risen Christ, both in his truth 
and his spirit, was melting through its depravities and 
errors. It will not do to ascribe this consciousness to 
fanatical imagination and allow to it no objective re- 
ality. Neither fanatical imaginations nor epileptic 
swoons change men from the dominion of lust, ha- 
tred, deceit, and demoniacal passion to that of love, 
purity, meekness, and the peace of God ; and from nar- 
row and selfish ends to the most heroic self-sacrifice and 
the highest moral energy the world had ever known. 
Dreams and visions which are generated of morbid 
conditions, and are only subjective, never bring new 
clearness and vigor to the wasted faculties, never 
evolve a more perfect manhood from under the old 
decay. But all this was done, and it was done with 
the common consciousness that the risen and glori- 
fied Christ was in the work as its inspiring life, and 
again and again was this corroborated by a parting 
of the clouds, between which he appeared to them 
from his nearing heavens to .guide them. The in- 
auguration of a new era of history in connection 
with this common consciousness is the complete 
confirmatory evidence of the resurrection of Jesus 
Christ. 



400 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

We should apply our philosophies with great mod- 
esty and reserve to such facts as are reported by these 
witnesses. Difficulties occur. Deny the facts and 
the epoch which dates from them is wholly inexpli- 
cable and the greatest life ever lived on the earth is 
without unity. Admit the facts and there are diffi- 
culties still, but they are of another kind. They are 
such as are resolvable into our ignorance, into our 
crude and clumsy pneumatologies or our very super- 
ficial knowledge of laws which are subtile and all 
pervasive, and which we only see as fragmentary 
now. Touching the resurrection of Christ we look 
from below upward. We stand gazing into heaven, 
and so we look at the clouds on the darker side ; when 
we look from heaven downward the same clouds will 
be illumined wreaths lying off on the world below. 

In the death and resurrection of Christ the nat- 
ural body saw no corruption. In this mainly is his 
transition distinguishable from ours. But there are 
considerations connected with it of vast significance. 
The transforming power of our own interior life over 
the natural body which is its clothing and exfigura- 
tion continues up to the moment of death. There 
it ceases, and the immortal being must be extricated 
from his mortal coverings. He has no power to ex- 
trude them and return them un corrupted to their na- 
tive elements and so he leaves a corpse as his legacy 
to the earth. But the Life made flesh in Jesus 
Christ is not to be measured by the weak and Ian- 



THE REAPPEAKINGS OF JESUS. 4OI 

guid pulses of ours. It was nearer the infinite source 
and was the fullness of the Godhead bodily. That a 
Spirit like his should not need extrication from the 
bonds of death but should rapidly transform them 
and turn them by a living process into their native 
ethers, leaving no corpse to see corruption, is conso- 
nant with all that is told us of his birth, of his Di- 
vine Life transfiguring the natural form that invested 
it as that Life was growing deep and full and too re- 
splendent for its earthly foliage. 

What is the change signified by the ascension of 
Christ 1 A higher and more perfect pneumatology 
will show,, we doubt not, that death is something very 
difierent from what our childish imaginations have 
made it ; that there are no breaks and chasms in our 
continuous being ; that, therefore, the first condition 
after death is in some sort of congruity with the 
condition before death ; that the spiritual body 
evolved from the natural does not put off' at once 
all its natural appearances and adaptations.^ Hence 
the pre-ascension appearances of the " forty days,'' 
when Jesus showed his disciples his hands and his 
side, saying, " A spirit hath not flesh and bones as 
ye see me to have." But when the Divine Life from 

1 Swedenborg in his very rational pneumatology illustrates this at 
large, showing that the changes from an earthly to a heavenly con- 
dition through death are not made by crossing over chasms, but by 
the life within, unfolding in an orderly way and robing itself anew, so 
that the natural appearances just before death and just after may be 
similar. 

26 



402 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

within was ultimated in its full power and bright- 
ness, all the remnants of the natural life disap- 
peared, and Jesus was only ensphered with the ce- 
lestial glories. And this was the ascension of Christ ! 
Type and representation of our own transition, if we 
follow humbly through his upward and radiant path- 
way ! After the ascension his disciples only saw him 
in their more heavenly frames and beholdings. 

There are those who talk of intuition as the surest 
and highest evidence, but who do not seem to be 
aware of the application of the truth which they in- 
voke. All other intuitions pale into dimness before 
those which attest the resurrection of Jesus Christ. 
All other revelations of God in humanity compared 
with this are as starlight which precedes the dawn. 
Not the vision of apostles alone, not the word of eye- 
witnesses on the great morning and during the " forty 
days ; " but the consensus of Christendom for eigh- 
teen hundred years is cumulative evidence for the 
reappearings of Jesus. The highest experiences and 
profoundest introversions of the purest and healthiest 
minds along this whole track of the centuries bring 
them into correspondency with the risen and glori- 
fied Saviour ; not by open vision, but by signs and 
tokens quite as trustworthy. When men have been 
turned from darkness to light, from the slavery of 
lust and sin to the joyous service of the living God ; 
when the Divine Voice has come down upon the 
stormy seas of passion in the soul commanding au- 



THE REAPPEARINGS OF JESUS, 403 

dience, " still as night or summer's noon-tide air ; " 
when all its higher powers have been waked into 
life ; faith, sympathy, disinterested love, tenderness 
towards God and towards everything that breathes ; 
when the peace has come at last where storms and 
conflicts are no more ; it has all been with the pro- 
foundest consciousness of a risen Saviour near at 
hand, with his assurance, " All power is given me 
both in heaven and upon the earth." If the intui- 
tions of the soul are to be appealed to, what are its 
shadowy gropings compared with these sun-bright 
beholdings of so many of the best and healthiest 
minds through a period of eighteen hundred years ? 



CHAPTER XI. 

THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST. 

^ I ^HE four biographers of Jesus have given no de- 
-L scription of his person, such as his form, figure, 
features, expression of countenance, walk, gestu^p, 
tones of voice and style of speech or eloquence. The 
reason is partly that moral painting after the modern 
style was remote from their thought and purpose, 
simple narrative being all they aim at ; and there 
was a further reason, for the subject-matter of the 
divine message so controlled and subordinated the 
manner as to blend with it and become a part of it, 
and they never thought of separating one from the 
other. 

In reading these biographies, however, it must occur 
to any one that such things could not have been 
done nor such words spoken in a way comporting 
with our ordinary methods of utterance. There is a 
class of writers who, looking at Jesus only from the 
natural side, and ignoring or denying a large portion 
of the record, find in him an amiable young man, of 
sweet and winning manners, almost feminine, which 
endeared him to his followers, and gained the affec- 
tions of little children and Syrian maids ; — a remark- 




THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST, 405 

able and promising youth cut off by an untimely 
death. Herein they discern those traits of moral 
beauty which cannot be mistaken, and which beam 
forth along the whole pathway of Jesus of Nazareth. 
But let any one take this portraiture as expressing 
his entire^character, and go through his history with 
it, and he will find a whole range of facts which are 
utterly inexplicable, and that he has not yet seen the 
person of Jesus Christ. Though his biographers 
attempt no such portraiture, it comes of itself, and 
gathers consistence, clearness, and brightness in the 
imagination, as we read their story. It is that of 
supernal power and majesty, always in reserve under 
these lineaments of moral beauty and gentleness. 
This comes to us from casual expressions which they 
let fall here and there, and more yet from the impres- 
sion which his person and manner made upon their 
minds, and the minds of the multitudes. We are to 
remember that they seldom understood the import 
of his doctrine, while their sensibilities were stirred 
sometimes to their lowest depths ; and that this 
effect, therefore, must be ascribed to the tone and 
manner of its utterance. At the close of the Sermon 
on the Mount, crowds were struck with astonishment 
because he taught as one having authority, not as the 
teachers of the law. To get the whole meaning of 
this, we must reproduce the scene to ourselves. 
Moses was the supreme authority in all the teaching 
of that day ; as binding and as sacred as if they 



406 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

heard it audibly from Mount Sinai. Here is a man 
who quotes no precedent, acknowledges no author- 
ity, but- standing up before the people, pushes Moses 
and all his special code clean out of the way, and 
with only the formula, " I say unto you," legislates to 
the world from the immediate conceptions and reve- 
lations of his own mind. What amiable young Jew 
could have done this ? What man of ordinary pres- 
ence could have done it, without raising a shout of 
derision from the multitude ? This man did it ^ 
such wise as to fill them with a sense of wonder. 
And it shows that they had some vision, however 
dim, of a moral power and majesty towering above 
Sinai itself 

It is no explanation of the authority of Jesus over 
the crowds that came to him, to ascribe it to the 
miracles which he wrought. If the miraculous power 
was merely something adjoined to him as a common 
man, he would have excited the same curiosity as the 
wonder-workers and jugglers of his day. His miracu- 
lous works were plainly the emanations of his own 
being, the forthgoing of that Divine force which gave 
command to his words. Not merely the works them- 
selves, but the mind and grace beaming through 
them so as to determine their manner and adaptation, 
impressed the multitude and held them as with a 
spell. Hence people approach him as one clothed 
with royalty. They come " worshipping," that is, 
bowing in adoration, or they come "kneeling," or 



THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST. 407 

they come "falling at his feet," or "trembling and 
falling down to him/' ^ Remembering the air of com- 
mand and authority, felt always in his presence, and 
its subduing power over the minds of men, many pas- 
sages in his biography otherwise inexplicable need 
no explanation, — the money-changers vacating the 
temple courts at his word ; the police officers going 
to arrest him, but cowering before him as they come 
into his presence ; his walking unharmed among the 
engaged multitude, as at Nazareth, where they were 
prompted to throw him down a precipice but did not 
dare to lay hands on his person ; the fear and vacil- 
lation of Pilate in the palace at his final examination. 
Often he speaks to the people and holds them by the 
power of his words when it is plain that his meaning 
is quite above their range, and that it is the manner 
not the subject-matter that amazes and even convinces 
them. On the great day of the Feast of the Taber- 
nacles, for instance, when they were pouring out 
water around the altar, Jesus arrests the ceremony, 
standing above it and calling aloud, " If any man 
thirst let him come unto me and drink." " He that 
believeth on me, out of his breast shall flow rivers of 
living water." Not a word of this could his hearers 
have understood as to its interior meaning. But 
many of the crowd said to one another on hearing it, 
"This is certainly the Prophet." "This is the 

Matt. XV. 25, xvii. 14, xx. 20 \ Mark i. 40, x. 17 ; Luke viii. 41, 47. 



4C8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

Christ." And his enemies present, and wishing to 
arrest him, did not dare to Uft a hand against him. 

Even after his arrest there was a hngering fear in 
the minds of his enemies, lest some supernatural 
agency should take him out of their hands, for even 
at the cross when the drugs were brought to him to 
drink, some of them said, " Hold ! let us see whether 
Elijah is coming to take him down." 

Though his biographers do not describe to us the 
expression of his eye and countenance, they more 
than intimate their efficacy and influence. Some- 
times when his hearers were astounded at his words 
the Evangelist says he spake " looking around " or 
" looking at them ; " or again, when the cavillers came 
to ensnare him, he " looked at them with anger ; " 
or again, when the young ruler came kneeling to him, 
he loved him, " looking upon him," — passages which 
plainly imply that power and grace went out from 
him, not merely in his words, but in the beamings and 
flashings of his countenance.^ 

In the walk of Jesus with his disciples, we find 
none of that kind of intercourse which they had 
with each other. There is confidence, love, tender- 
ness ; none of that entire interchange of mind and 
lighter sentiment which we find among familiars. 
True they stand with him on the common ground of 
humanity and friendship, but they are conscious all 

1 Mark x. 23-27, iii. 5. 



THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST. 409 

the while of a Divine sphere of Being rising above 
them and beyond their sight and comprehension, be- 
neath which they are held in mysterious awe. This 
feeling seems to have grown deeper and stronger 
after his transfiguration. It was their sense of his 
power and majesty, always felt but never understood, 
which drew them to him at the first in the bonds of 
discipleship, made them forsake their business at 
once and follow him, and held their minds in daily 
expectation that, in some way unknown to themselves, 
he was to break upon the world as the conqueror of 
the Roman power. No personal attractions or amia- 
bility of deportment could have thus wrought upon 
the minds of the people ; no power of working 
miracles could have invested an obscure peasant of 
Galilee in those attributes which so separated him 
from all other men as to inspire a reverence and fear 
more profound and pervading than any inspired by 
the glare of earthly royalties. 

The tones of voice in which a man's words are 
spoken, generally measure the extent and the depth 
of his moral power and influence. They are the soul 
of all speech. The grandest speech without them 
may fall frigid and powerless, whereas truths which 
I had seemed commonplace and worn out, may be so 
reinspired with them as not only to become new, but 
pierce the soul with depths of meaning never before 
dreamed of, and fill it with tremblings of hope and 
fear. Tones can neither be assumed nor imitated ; 



4IO THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

nor can they be reported. Their power can only 
be represented by the effect which they produce. 
WhUefield's preaching which so shook the crowds 
and swayed them, owed its power primarily to the 
tones that inspired it, for his printed sermons contain 
nothing but the commonplaces of the received Chris- 
tianity. 

We may faintly conceive, but we cannot adequately 
represent how truths new-born in such a nature as 
that of Jesus would be toned and uttered ; nay, how 
the most common and familiar speech of a nature so 
inspired would vibrate through the hearts of his 
hearers. If we take into full account this element of 
moral and spiritual power, we shall be saved a great 
deal of futile criticism pertaining to the miracles 
wrought by "the voice of the Son of Man.'' His 
manner evidently was simple and undemonstrative, 
but the tones of his voice searched th^ very centres 
of being, melted their frozen springs of life, and set 
them free. How careful the evangelists are to pre- 
serve the very words he spoke, to which such won- 
derful effects were traced ; rather how the words 
clung to the memory, and would not go out of it, and 
though common words were untranslatable into any 
other language ! The little girl who had expired, he 
takes by the hand, with the words, '^ Talitha cumil' 
and the little girl came back to life and rose up. To 
the deaf man he says, " Ephatha'' and his ears are 
opened. These were Syriac words ; the language 



THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST, 41 1 

spoken by our Saviour in his intercourse with men. 
They were common words. Why does the Evangel- 
ist retain them when writing in Greek ? Because, as 
Dr. Furness has said, "they were severed as by a 
stroke of Hghtning from all other words," not merely, 
however, because the disciples saw the effect which 
they produced, but because the tones in which they 
were uttered made them untranslatable ; tones which 
so searched the very life-centres as to touch the foun- 
tains of existence, and make them flow with healing 
power through the physical frame. These tones, not 
because of their loudness, but because a divine com- 
passion more pervading and far-reaching than ever 
vibrated in a human voice was thrilling through them, 
found Lazarus in his death-sleep. Jesus " cried with 
a loud voice," says the Evangelist ; literally with a 
great voice (^ov^ /xcyaAry), great because of its power 
to reach the seat of consciousness and make the 
frozen currents of life to melt and start anew. And 
in that cry upon the cross, " Eloi, Eloi, lama sabach- 
thani," there seems no other reason for preserving 
the original words, unless it be that the tones, not 
the words, shivered through the hearts of the stand- 
ers-by, and startled them with thoughts of a suffering 
that was more than mortal, as if the heart then break- 
ing had drawn into its divine recesses the woes of a 
whole race, which found utterance in its expiring 
wail. 
With these conceptions of the power and majesty 



412 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

of Jesus, we cannot look with satisfaction, or even 
patience, on those paintings and engravings designed 
to represent his person, and which are put into so 
many picture-frames, and so many " Lives of Christ/* 
The features of some of them are feminine, some of 
them Jewish, all of them the feeble conceptions of 
artists who ought to keep their poor ideals out 
of sight. The only portraiture, it seems to us, which 
any earnest believer can regard with satisfaction, is 
the one which dawns upon his rising faith ; nor will 
that satisfy him as anything which he can fix and 
frame, for it will change as he changes, and as the 
Christ of consciousness grows into the image and 
likeness of the living God. 



PART IV. 

THE JOHANNEAN THEOLOGY. 



*' It breathes the air of peace, yet sounds at times like a peal of 
thunder from the other world ; it soars majestically like the eagle 
towards the uncreated source of light, and yet hovers as gently as a 
dove over the earth ; it is sublime as a seraph, yet simple as a child ; 
high and serene as the heaven, deep as the unfathomable sea." 

SCHAFF. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE COSMOLOGY OF PLATO. 

'T^HEOLOGY is the knowledge of God. Religion 
-*- is that knowledge so used and applied, and so 
entering into human experience and the personal life 
that it draws man to God and binds him in loving 
fealty to the throne. There may be theology without 
religion, for God may be apprehended by the intellect 
alone, and then the idea of Him floats idle as a spec- 
ulation and is never converted into conduct. There 
cannot be any true religion without theology, for 
where there is no knowledge of God there is either 
atheism or blind superstition. And just in that de- 
gree that the knowledge of the Divine becomes clear 
and sufficing is human nature swayed and renovated 
by it and drawn upward into the Divine communion. 
The Christology of the New Testament and that 
of the fourth Gospel preeminently, has for eighteen 
centuries brought men into conscious relations with 
God, more filial and tender than any other work has 
done. This undoubtedly is the highest and the ulti- 
mate evidence both of its authenticity and genuine- 
ness ; for any work which opens in human nature the 
deepest fountains of devotion and joy comes to it 



4l6 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

with the most authentic tidings of the divine nature 
and name. But what is to be said if there are very 
good and capable persons, and very keen critics 
withal, whom the book does not affect in this way ? 
Why, there is nothing to be said. But it is an urgent 
motive to study a book with expectant minds, when 
men like Clement, Origen, Augustine, Chrysostom, 
Neander, and Schleiermacher have found in its theol- 
ogy the key-note of all the harmonies divine and 
human, and the open entrance to the knowledge and 
fruition of God. 

After all, however, let us confess that none of our 
statements are likely to be exhaustive. None of our 
creeds have crystallized the whole Johannean theol- 
ogy, or probably ever will. When we have put every 
thing visible and tangible to us into our formulas, 
there is still a divine atmosphere which infolds us, 
and which we breathe and live in though unseen, 
and there are clefts in the heavens still higher, sug- 
gesting fields of truth not yet open to our gaze. 

The theology of the New Testament, and of the 
fourth Gospel especially, took peculiar form and de- 
termination, because it collided with preceding or con- 
temporaneous systems of belief There are in the 
New Testament traces of Platonism, and of systems 
into which Platonism developed, and which, in the 
time of Christ and for more than a century afterward, 
were in constant flower and fruitage. No exposition 
of the Johannean theology can be made tolerably 



THE COSMOLOGY OF PLATO. 417 

intelligible without some clear apprehension of the 
leading features of the philosophy and the cosmology 
to which it stands contrasted, and which consciously 
or not determined the moulds in which it was cast. 

It is not necessary to reproduce the whole system 
of Plato ; and the best scholars who have attempted 
it have found it no easy task. It is to be gathered 
from the Platonic dialogues whose interlocutors con- 
flict with each other, and which of them are person- 
ating Plato himself it is very difficult sometimes to 
decide. But two of his latest and most elaborate pro- 
ductions were the " RepubHc " and the " Timaeus," 
and there is no doubt they give us the ripened wis- 
dom of the master-mind of antiquity. They were writ- 
ten after he had completed his travels, and gathered 
and compacted the highest truths of the Grecian and 
Oriental philosophies, and fused them into a system 
of his own ; and the workings of his genius in their 
reproduction come the nearest to divine inspiration 
of anything we know of within the compass of what 
is absurdly called profane literature. True, he leaves 
the inductive method and breaks away from sense 
altogether, and his science would provoke the derision 
of any sophomore ; but his undazzled imagination 
quickened by a pure moral instinct gives him a vision 
of divine truths which science had groped after in 
vain. 

Timaeus, the chief speaker in the dialogue that 
bears his name, is a Pythagorean ; but he is giving 
27 



41 8 7 HE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

the thought of Plato colored deeply with the Pytha- 
gorean philosophy. We may leave out the physiology, 
as not necessary to our purpose. Its cosmology be- 
comes important, and with collateral lights of inter- 
pretation from the other dialogues is capable of being 
clearly evolved and described. It is the highest utter- 
ance that comes to us from the ante-christian ages, 
and has been called, not inaptly, " The Hymn of the 
Universe." It did not claim to be the absolute truth, 
but the most rational probability which the human 
intellect was able to achieve. 

Three postulates are assumed. First a Demiur- 
gus, or divine artificer. This is not an unconscious 
force, but a being of personal attributes. He is the 
Supremely Good. But lest the Good should be mis- 
taken for an abstract quality, or a mere dynamic 
force, it is described also as a Divine Intelligence. 
It is the Nous, or Supreme Intellect ; under which 
designation the Good is conceived as determined 
by an infinite Reason, and so giving its impress 
upon all things where it operates, of the highest 
order and beauty. Thus the Agathon and the Nous 
are names which are used interchangeably. It is 
important to bear in mind this two-fold designation 
and to remember that in the Platonic hypothesis 
not the Good merely, but Intelligence or Mind 
was in the beginning of things and was the presid- 
ing and constructive force in the architecture of the 
universe. 






THE COSMOLOGY OF FLA TO. 



419 



The second postulate of the Platonic cosmology is 
the ideals or archetypes, after the model of which 
all things were to be made. They were co-eternal 
with the Demiurgus, existing not within his mind but 
objective to it, apart in their own heavenly locality. 
They were the patterns of all beauty and perfection. 
They were timeless, for time implies succession and 
change ; but since the archetypes were unchangeably 
perfect, they had no past and no future, and so were 
without time. Some writers, it is true, have tried to 
make these ideals to exist only within the divine 
intellect, its ideas or subjective states. Herein they 
modernize Plato, for he makes them separate enti- 
ties occupying their own intelligible world, no more 
existing within the divine mind than the stereotype 
plates of the printer exist within his mind. The 
ideals are objectively things of the divine contem- 
plation though subject to the divine control. They 
correspond in some sort to Kant's things-in-them- 
selves, — primal essences, that is, which exist within 
and beyond phenomena, and which remain after phe- 
nomena have passed off and left them bare. Only 
Kant denied that we could ever shake hands with 
them, or know the least about them in this life, and 
across the gulf of phenomena. Plato, we shall see, 
contrived wings on which to cross the chasm and 
soar, with his All-hail, into the midst of them. 
These archetypes existed as both general and spe- 
cial; as one perfect eternal whole, subject to no 



420 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

increase or diminution, but comprehending in itself 
all possibilities of class, order, genera, and species. 

The third postulate of the Platonic cosmology is 
a primitive chaos which had existed from the begin- 
ning. It is first described as wild and disorderly 
matter, containing the prime elements of earth, air, 
fire, and water, subject to no beneficent law, but eter- 
nally discordant and surging only by indeterminate 
chance. But in the latter portion of the Timaeus 
Plato corrects himself, and renders this primitive 
chaos not as visible and disorderly matter, but a wild 
fundamentum of existence, the womb of some prima 
mater, dark and evil, but still an outlying chaos of 
indeterminate chance. 

Such being the postulates and antecedent possi- 
bilities, the Demiurgus proceeds to the architecture 
of the universe. He constructs the best possible 
from the material at hand. He takes the eternal 
and perfect patterns, the ideal earth, air, fire, and 
water, and dips them down into chaos, where they 
become clothed in visible and tangible body, — be- 
come material, earth, air, fire, and water, — and hence 
arose this Cosmos of beauty and order. The whole 
realm of ideals thus became incarnate or clothed 
upon, and so to the primal chaos succeeded the 
vast system of sun, moon, and stars, with the earth 
at the centre of the whole. In this constructive 
process all the cgntents of the primal chaos were 
used up, so that nothing was left outside to act upon 



THE COSMOLOGY OF PLATO. 42 1 

the new order of things. The primal chaos, how- 
ever, though wrought into the Cosmos, was never 
entirely subdued, but was always a disturbing ele- 
ment. The Demiurgus did the best he could with 
it by incarnating the ideals within it, but it still re- 
mained an evil and deceptive covering, so that phe- 
nomena or sensuous appearances are not reaUties, 
but ever-changing phantasms, not the perfect envis- 
agement of the eternal ideals, and therefore not the 
ground of knowledge but of opinion only. 

So the Cosmos arose. But as yet it was only a 
beautiful corpse. It must have a soul and be alive. 
This soul the Demiurgus proceeded to generate. It 
was constituted in a threefold proportion. It con- 
sisted of the harmonic, pure and simple ; the discord- 
ant, pure and simple ; and the harmonic and discord- 
ant mingled together. The soul thus constituted 
he infused through the Cosmos, stretching it from 
the centre through all its remotest parts, giving to 
the whole a communis sensus running throughout as 
on living nerves. Thus endowed the Cosmos be- 
came an animated being, though of many members ; 
a visible god, the most beautiful image of the invis- 
ible, having the impress of the Nous, the Divine 
Reason itself Then began its motions and revolu- 
tions and the endless processions of Time. 

The Cosmos was constituted a perfect sphere, and 
with the exception of the earth, which is fixed near 
the centre, it turns perpetually on an axis or spindle 



422 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

that passes through it, and sweeps round in one 
circular motion the planets and the stars, which are 
portions of it. But though the Cosmos itself was an 
animated being and a visible god, the Demiurgus 
constituted within it other gods, the Cosmos being 
the genera of which the others were species. The 
earth, the planets, the sun and moon and the fixed 
stars, were endowed severally and specially, each with 
a soul and consciousness of its own, so that each of 
them became an animated being eternal and divine. 
Let not the reader be puzzled with this Platonic 
conception of gods special, existing within another 
god which is generic and all-comprehensive. Plato 
conceived of it, we presume, somewhat as we conceive 
the life of the plant determined from that of nature 
in general, or as we represent to ourselves angels and 
men existing within the all-pervading Deity, their 
consciousness flowering out individually from one 
broader and more generic, which is the ground of 
them all and underlies them all. 

The earth was the first-born of these gods individ- 
ually constituted ; was placed stationary at the centre 
of the Cosmos to preside over its axial motions, and 
thus made the ruler of Night and Day.^ Next were 

1 W^e generally follow Mr. Grote's exposition of the difficult pas- 
sages in Plato, but here we cannot. It is a question whether Plato 
teaches that the earth rotates on a common axis with the planets, 
the sun, and the stars, that is, on the spindle on which the whole 
Cosmos turns ; or whether it is fixed at the centre while the others 
move round it Grote thinks that in the Platonic astronomy it ro- 



THE COSMOLOGY OF PLATO. 423 

the fixed stars or stellar gods, which were placed on 
the extreme circle of the Cosmos ; and last, the plan- 
etary, which constitute our solar system with its re- 
volving orbs. But in the bodies of our solar and 
planetary system the discordant soul was largely 
infused. Hence their irregular motions. Besides 
their revolution on the cosmic axis towards the 
right, they have a counter revolution of their own 
towards the left, though not rapid enough to over- 
come the other in which they are always borne along. 
But in the sidereal circle the harmonic soul inspires 

tates with the rest. How then could it be the ruler of night and day, 
since it would always expose the same hemisphere to the sun, while 
the other hemisphere would be in perpetual night ? Grote thinks 
Plato did not see the inconsistency. The following is the passage 
in the Timaeus : V7\v Se rpocpov Tj/uLercpay, el\\o/x€V7}p he Tcepl rhv 
dih iravrhs ttSXov rerajULevoVf ^vXaKa KoX hruuiovpyhv vuKrh^ re Koi rj/uL^pas 
iluL7}Kav^(TaT0, irpcarrjv Ka\ TrpearlSvTdTrjv decou Hcroi ivros ovpavov yeySvaau 
" Then he made the earth our common nourisher, which being crowded 
round the axis which extends through all things, is the keeper and 
artificer of night* and day, as well as the first and eldest of the gods 
that have been generated in the universe.'' 

Mr. Grote understands etAAo^eVryr to mean ^^ packed rou7td^^'' so 2iS 
to be fixed fast to the axis and move with it. It is not necessary to 
suppose this. The axis was like a spindle through a series of spools, 
some of which might be stationary while the others rotate. But 
Plato must be held no way responsible for our laws of gravitation, 
nor any of our modern physics. His worlds are all gods alive and 
conscious, and the earth is the elder born, ruling frorn the centre like 
the commander of an army, not by physical laws but by moral, so 
that under this ruler they dispense night and day by moving in 
majestic order and with rhythmic melodies. Even the spindle at the 
centre we imagine was an ideal one. 



424 I^H^ FOURTH GOSPEL. 

every motion ; hence the stars of the upper firma- 
ment move with the most perfect rhythmic order, 
discourse the most heavenly sphere-music, and sing 
together their everlasting song. 

Thus the gods were generated by the Demiurgus, 
the only gods towards which Plato seems to have 
had any faith or reverence. For the polytheism of 
his times, copied from Hesiod and commonly re- 
ceived, he has evidently a profound contempt, thinly 
veiled, however, and insinuated rather than expressed, 
as the fate of Socrates warned him of the conse- 
quences. 

Having formed the Cosmos, and all the stellar and 
planetary gods that live within it and make a part 
of it, the Demiurgus next proceeded to the formation 
of man. But man was to be mortal ; therefore the 
Demiurgus, who was essentially immortal, does not 
create man directly and in his own name, but he 
commits the work to other and inferior hands. The 
gods whom he had formed are assembled, and to 
them is confided the construction of the species next 
below them. He tells them that they (the gods) 
will be immortal, not in their own nature but by his 
appointment ; that the Cosmos, however, is not com- 
plete ; that other and lower races are to be consti- 
tuted ; that he cannot undertake their construction, 
because they would thereby be rendered immortal ; 
but that they (the gods) are to undertake the work 
in imitation of the power which had just been exer- 



THE COSMOLOGY OF PLATO. 425 

cised in the formation of themselves. The Demiur- 
gus supplies an immortal element, to which the gods 
are to join bodily and mortal elements to be drawn 
from the body of the Cosmos. 

There was a remnant left of the cosmical soul, an 
over-soul which had not been used up, but greatly 
inferior in excellence and purity. This remnant the 
Demiurgus compounds anew, and then divides and 
distributes into a number of souls equal to the num- 
ber of the fixed stars. Each soul previous to its 
mortal incarnation was to be sent to its own con- 
genial star, there to be carried round in the cosmic 
revolutions, and enjoy the contemplation of supernal 
wisdom, and hear the sweet music of the harmonic 
spheres. In this pre-natal state the destiny of each 
soul in the long future was to be unrolled to it, the 
mysteries of the universe explained, and the heavenly 
knowledge drank in, afterwards to be overlaid and 
buried under the swathings of mortality. In this 
pre-natal state it was to learn that at an appointed 
hour it must be joined with a mortal body, and with 
two inferior and mortal souls along with it ; that 
it must descend into this earthly incarnation, be sub- 
ject to pleasure and pain, and fear and anger ; en- 
counter the irrational enemies of the lower souls and 
the mortal body ; that these enemies must be over- 
come and subdued as a condition after death of re- 
ascending to its native star. But if it was itself 
overcome and failed in the combat, it would descend 



426 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

after death into lower conditions ; into the body of 
some inferior animal, would continue to sink into 
lower and lower animal natures, until its victory had 
been achieved. That done and not before, it could 
reascend to the enjoyment of the supernal wisdom 
and the music of the harmonic spheres. 

The gods having received these instructions, pro- 
ceeded to carry out this plan of the Demiurgus. The 
human souls were first distributed each to its con- 
genial star, and then born into bodies which the gods 
constructed from the body of the Cosmos, that is, 
from the four elements, of fire, air, earth, and water, 
to be returned to the Cosmos again. But into this 
body they placed also two mortal souls, there to be 
the accompaniment of the immortal soul descending 
from its star, and to antagonize it in the combat of 
life. The immortal soul they placed in the head ; 
one of the mortal souls they placed in the thorax, and 
made it the seat of passion, anger, and rage ; the other 
and still baser one they placed below the diaphragm, 
and made the seat of sensual and beastly appetites. 
Such in the Platonic philosophy was to be the con- 
flict between the higher and lower natures of man. 

At birth, and for some time afterward, the celestial 
nature — the soul descended from its star, — is com- 
pletely dulled and muffled, and does not report itself 
in the consciousness. Gradually, however, it makes 
itself to be felt and heard ; and when its behests are 
obeyed, gleams of its pre-natal condition and knowl- 



THE COSMOLOGY OF PLATO, 427 

edge, and murmurs of the sphere-melodies like 
snatches of far-off music, come over the inward sense 
and draw it upward. By contemplation of the glories 
of the Cosmos, not through sight alone, but through 
the rational and immortal soul, passion and appetite 
are held subordinate and become its lackeys ; the 
celestial nature triumphs in the conflict, and the soul 
reascends at death to its congenial star. Not so if it 
basely yields and the battle goes against it. Then it 
descends by a series of degradations through lower 
and lower natures, — the Pythagorean doctrine of the 
transmigration of souls. 

Plato reverses the steps of modern naturalism. It 
develops man out of the polypus or the oyster 
through all the ascending grades of reptile and quad- 
ruped, till the human form rises erect and looks into 
the skies. Plato sees in all animal natures a reversed 
and degraded human nature, where the victory had 
been lost in the triumph of the mortal and bestial 
souls over the celestial, or of sense over reason. 
Originally, at the first formation of man, there was 
no division of sex. Pure manhood was the primitive 
shape of our unfallen humanity. But men who 
became cowards transmigrated after death into the 
forms of women, and thereafter the race was bisex- 
ual. Men whose minds were only speculative, light, 
and fantastic, transmigrated in the form of birds that 
flit through the air. Men who became enslaved to 
bestial appetites, in whom the star-soul was overlaid 



428 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

and lost, bent earthward lower and lower, their heads 
elongated downward till they were prepared for the 
bodies of quadrupeds, in which they walk on all-fours 
and look earthward and feed from the ground alone. 
Some become still more bestial, cleave closer to the 
earth and become reptiles. Those who are buried 
still deeper in sense, become too stupid to live in air, 
and transmigrate as fishes of the sea, or as oysters 
that live in mud. Thus the range of animal existence 
is not an original creation. It is man fallen from his 
primitive state into forms of degradation of remoter 
and remoter resemblance to the form of his celestial 
manhood till it is almost lost and disappears. It is 
the mirror in which man may read in the long and 
ever-darkening imagery the effect of the slavery of the 
celestial nature to the irrational and the bestial. 

This is Plato's Book of Genesis. Its darker pages 
he hurries over, charmed with its brighter ones ; and 
he ends in a strain of exultation and delight : " Our 
discourse about the universe is ended. It has re- 
ceived its complement of animation, mortal and im- 
mortal ; it has become greatest, best, most beautiful 
and most perfect : a visible animated Being compre- 
hending all things visible, a manifest God, the image 
of the cogitable God ; this Uranus, one and only-be- 
gotten." 



CHAPTER II. 

CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF THE PLATONIC COS- 
MOLOGY. 

THE Platonic Cosmology was prophetic of some 
of the highest truths of Christianity. All the 
Greek and oriental religions which had preceded it, 
not grossly polytheistic, broke down in materialism, 
pantheism, or atheism. Plato's system may have 
found its root and stem among them, but it rises out 
of them and above them into a clear and positive 
monotheism. It anticipates the first grand annuncia- 
tion of the Christian revelation, by placing the Word 
at the beginning and not at the end of creation. 
Reason and intelligence were coeval with primal 
being. At the end was the Word, says Pantheism. 
Reason and intelligence are the last evolution of 
natural forces, whose beginnings were unintelligent 
and unconscious matter quick with life at some un- 
known centre ; developing outward into the various 
forms of vegetable and animal, and last of all develop- 
ing a human brain. This fine secretion, deposited in 
a skull, is the last and best organized essence, and out 
of this come reason and thought. Reason first ap- 
pears at the outermost limit of the Cosmos, and flashes 



430 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

forth as a pale fringe of light on the circumference. 
That is the logos of pantheism. And such with 
insignificant variations were the antecedent Greek 
Cosmologies, not polytheistic, from Thales to Plato. 
The only apparent exception is found in Anaxagoras, 
and this is hardly more than apparent, for the Nous, 
says Mr. Grote, which figures in his philosophy, scarce- 
ly rises above the rank of material agencies. 

In the beginning was the Word, says the cosmology 
of Plato, postulating the prime truth of the highest 
theism. The Nous, or Divine Reason, was at the 
origin of things. It preceded all development, pre- 
sided over it and gave to the Cosmos its own divine 
beauty and order. His system clears itself alike of 
polytheism* and pantheism. He sees the infinite 
mind in its unity ; differenced from the universe, yet 
ruling over it and through it and constructing all its 
forms after the patterns of the supreme perfection. 
Except in the Mosaic writings there was no higher 
and purer theism. 

Plato does not grasp the Christian doctrine of Prov- 
idence, but he approximates and foreshadows it. 
The Cosmos is all alive. The smallest part is related 
to every other part and to the whole. It has a con- 
scious soul that pervades every atom, and brings 
tidings from its outmost limit to its centre. The 
smallest star, as it goes round in its radiant cir- 
cle, adores its Maker, and like an angel sings. The 
highest soarings of modern poetry, in Plato, are sober 



I 



THE PLATONIC COSMOLOGY, 43 1 

prose. What in Shakespeare and Coleridge are mo- 
mentary flights of imagination, in Plato are symmetri- 
cal truths wrought by splendid mosaic in a system of 
the universe. The mere scientist can afford to laugh 
over the Platonic physiology and astronomy ; but his 
analysis accomplished, dead matter is all which he 
has left. He cannot join the severed members again 
so as to make a living whole. He is like the boy 
who hacks the bird in pieces, but thereby loses its 
warble forever. Plato, with all his mistakes of anal- 
ysis, more than atones for them in his majestic 
synthesis, which gives us not a dead but a living 
universe. 

His doctrine of human nature on one side is not 
only beautiful but divinely true. The immortal soul 
that is in man opens by an internal way towards the 
soul of the Cosmos, and through that towards its di- 
vine Maker. It never loses the first imprints of the 
supreme perfection stamped upon it from the ideals. 
They may be obscured and overlaid by mortality and 
corruption ; they may recede from the consciousness 
altogether, but they are never lost. Some day they 
may come out again in radiant outline. Some day 
the star-music of a pre-existent state may wake in the 
soul its sweetest memories, and breathe through it the 
lost harmonies again. Even on its downward course 
through the animal degradations, it is possibly career- 
ing towards its aphelion, where it may turn and on a 
brightening pathway regain the heaven it started from. 



432 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

Plato's doctrine of the animal kingdom, though false 
in form, has yet substantial truths, truths which even 
under the light of the Christian revelation sometimes 
get loosed from our grasp. The meanest animal has 
not an isolated and altogether forlorn existence. The 
brutes are kith and kin to the human beings that 
rule over them. They are not original creations, but 
the outcome of our fallen humanity in lower forms. 
They reflect back upon us its woes and sorrows, and 
touch a chord of tenderness, like the human grove in 
Dante's hell, which must not be rent too rudely. At 
the same time they hold up to man the mirror in 
which he sees, in the long and ever darkening per- 
spective, the penalties of subordinating his higher 
nature to the lower, and suffering the celestial soul 
to be trodden down out of sight under cruel passions 
or swinish appetites. 

The defects and the inhering vice of the system 
seen under the light of Christianity must already be 
obvious to the reader. Its dualism works mischief 
from centre to circumference, and is destructive of 
any real unity between God, the world, and humanity. 
The divine Nous was not alone in the beginning. 
An outlying chaos was also in the beginning ; a v\y] 
of disorder, essentially evil, coeval with God and co- 
eterilaL This with the ideals is the material already 
at hand out of which the Demiurgus must build the 
universe. Hence he is never a creator but only an 
architect. He builds as best he can, but some of 



THE PLATONIC COSMOLOGY, 433 

his material is bad and continues bad when wrought 
into the building, an element of unsoundness and 
destruction. Matter, the element drawn from the^A.77, 
is essentially evil, but forms the outward body and 
enrobement of the visible Cosmos and all which it 
contains. Though compelled to an external and ap- 
parent order, it is the corrupt and poisonous garment 
of the soul and the lying element in all material phe- 
nomena. Hence nothing is as it seems to be. Exter- 
nal nature only presents to us a troop of apparitions, 
always coming and vanishing, but giving no solid 
foundation for human knowledge. The perfect ideals 
are behind them and in them as their soul and 
essence, but they get no adequate expression or in- 
carnation. The Nous, or Divine Mind, is in first 
things, but never in last. He is the Alpha but never 
the Omega ; in the beginning but never in the ulti- 
mation. God is at the centre, but the hylic covering 
of matter is on the circumference, — the evil garment 
in which all essences are enveloped. Hence there 
is no pathway through Nature up to God. The 
universe can never be known through the senses. 
The immortal soul in man must ascend by an internal 
way to the soul of the Cosmos, quitting sense as 
much as possible, which is always dragging it towards 
the brute and the reptile. The Demiurgus affords 
no direct access to himself from his human subjects, 
but one indirect and circuitous through the Cos- 
mos, -T— his first and best image and manifestation. 
28 



434 '^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. 

In the Platonic philosophy sin is not an intrinsic, 
but an extrinsic evil. It comes from without, not 
from within. It belongs to the sensuous coat, which 
the soul, descending from its native star, is compelled 
to put on and wear through its earthly existence. 
Moral evil is removed not by an inward divine cleans- 
ing, but by being shelled off through the long and 
dreary process of transmigration. Why the soul was 
not kept in its native star, there to move through its 
celestial circle forever, instead of being muflfled and 
smothered in these poisonous coverings, Plato does 
not tell us, for it was evidently an ugly mystery in 
his own contemplations. 

Since the Platonic theology does not bring man 
into direct relations with God, it could not search the 
deeper mysteries of human nature, and reveal them 
to its own consciousness. This is nowhere more 
manifest than in Plato's estimate of woman. The 
feminine element in humanity, which is the interior, 
higher, and more divine, Plato makes exterior, lower, 
and more bestial. The masculine element, which is 
exterior, coarser, and lower down, he makes first 
and highest. By this indecent inversion of the two 
essentials of humanity he makes woman only a 
degradation of the species, a connecting link between 
man and the animals, drawing him down towards the 
reptiles, not between men and gods, drawing him 
upwards towards the celestial abodes. 

Platonism could be a religion for the philosophic 



THE PLATONIC COSMOLOGY, 435 

and contemplative few, but offered no boon to the 
toiling multitude buried under hylic coverings too 
deep to become conscious of their celestial lineage. 
The parting of the ways right and left satisfied no 
principle of divine justice, for on the right were only 
a few men of aesthetic culture and civil and social 
privilege, who drawing inward and upward from all 
mundane things and all sensuous influence sought 
communion with the soul of the Cosmos and thereby 
found pictured within them the ideals of the First 
Perfect and First Fair ; while on the left were the 
mass of mankind immersed in sense and in affairs 
on their way downward through the dreary road of 
transmigration. The inevitable result of the Platonic 
cultus was ascetic communions, separated from the 
world to the solitary and lazy intuitions of their own 
souls. 

It had a twofold development, in both directions 
sinking down from the high level of Plato. In one 
direction it sank to the Nihilism of the New Acad- 
emy.^ In the other direction it sank into Gnosticism, 
which was only saved from Nihilism by coming in 
contact with the Jewish and Christian religions, which 
it sought to take up and transform in its omnivorous 
receptivity. It furnished Gnosticism with the prime 
material out of which all its systems arose and flour- 
ished. We have already displayed the outline of 
these systems. In the present chapter we will show 

1 See Part I., chapter viii. 



436 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

the historic connection between them and Christian- 
ity, and especially with the Johannean theology as 
formulated in the fourth Gospel. 

Alexandria in Egypt, at the advent of Christ, was 
next after Rome the most flourishing city in the 
Roman Empire. It was the centre of commercial in- 
tercourse between the east and the west Moreover, 
it was the centre whence learning and philosophy 
were diffused throughout the then civilized world. 
Its population was largely composed of Jews and 
Greeks, not the Jews of a despised race, as they subse- 
quently became, but a people distinguished for wealth, 
learning, and refinement. Philo, writing at or near 
the Christian era, says that two out of the five divis- 
ions of the city were occupied by Jews ; and that in 
Alexandria and the other cities of Egypt they num- 
bered one million inhabitants. The Greek language 
had become the language both of learning and com- 
merce, and was spoken in the principal cities of the 
east and the west. It was the language of Alexandria, 
and opened to the Jewish population the treasures of 
Greek literature. The city became a second Athens, 
from whose schools and libraries the Greek philos- 
ophy had a vastly wider reach and influence than in 
the times of Plato four hundred years before. Here 
Plato lived again, and for more than one hundred and 
fifty years had been moulding the thought of the 
most enlightened and contemplative minds. His 
works were studied and commented upon as a divine 



THE PLATONIC COSMOLOGY, 437 

fountain of truth. His language became the lan- 
guage of the Jewish Scriptures in the famous Sep- 
tuagint version, and it was the language of worship 
in the synagogues of Alexandria. Jewish writers 
endeavored to adapt Judaism to the Greek mind by 
making Moses talk like Plato. They imported the 
Genesis of the Timaeus into that of the Pentateuch, 
and then charged Plato with borrowing from Moses. 
Philo breaks away from the rugged and narrow liter- 
alism of Judaism by assuming that the letter, like the 
hylic covering of the Platonic cosmology, is only for 
ignorant and sensuous men, who can only be gov- 
erned through their fears ; that God is far within 
and above, whose true sons find Him by an internal 
road away from the letter and from sense into the 
heart of the Divine love. There are two Jehovahs, 
he says in the Old Testament ; one of them is pre- 
sented as a man with human form and passions as the 
governor of ignorant masses ; the other is not a man, 
and is only to be known by the wise and virtuous 
few. The Logos, or Creative Word of the Jewish 
Scriptures, he subordinates to the Supreme Deity. 
He calls it a second god, king, angel, high-priest, first- 
born son of the Highest, and to this sub-deity he 
ascribes the creation of the visible universe and the 
promulgation of the law from Mount Sinai. In this 
Logos he says the ideals, or patterns of visible things, 
preexisted, a perfect intelligible world from which 
the visible was copied out. We agree entirely with 



438 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

Mosheim and Dorner that Philo in his own thought 
did not herein make the Logos a second person in the 
Godhead, and that he only kigged in Plato and made 
Moses talk like him as much as possible in order to 
recommend Judaism to the Greek mind. But the 
Jewish Hellenizers went farther than Philo. The dual- 
ism of Plato they imported completely into Judaism. 
The Jehovah of the Old Testament was not the 
Supreme God at all. Philo's rhetoric hardens into 
dogma. The all-pure and perfect one did not create 
this bad world, and never comes in contact with it. 
The Word which created the world and governs it 
was only one of his angels. In this milder form of 
Gnosticism we have Plato's dualism over again with 
very insignificant modifications. 

The development did not stop here. Platonism, by 
borrowing an element from the Parsee religion, made 
the God of Judaism and the creator of this world not 
one of the higher angels, but an evil demon ; so that 
Judaism becomes not angel worship but devil wor- 
ship. The dualism is still more fatal and hopeless, 
and the chasm between God and the world yawns 
wider and deeper than ever. 

How Platonism garbed as Gnosticism collided 
with Christianity at its earliest formulation, and 
sought to absorb it, we have already described.^ The 
Christ, it said, comes into this world not through' 
Judaism but from above it. He is a higher angel 

1 See Part I., chapters i. and ii. 



THE PLATONIC COSMOLOGY. 439 

than the Demiurgus, the best and most immaculate 
of that celestial hierarchy which they call the Ple- 
roma. His ingress was at the scene of the baptism, 
and his egress was just before the crucifixion, so that 
the Christ was never born nor crucified. This was the 
Christology of Cerinthus, who was now at Ephesus. 
The Syrian Gnostics went farther than Cerinthus, 
and turned the whole Jesus Christ into an apparition. 
The scandal of the cross, the prime difficulty, as it 
was thought, in commending the Gospel to the cul- 
tivated Greek mind, was hereby removed out of the 
way. The most devoted disciple of Plato could find 
room for Christianity in the unbounded hospitality of 
the Academy. 

That the Apostles, during the first half century 
after the ascension of Christ, were well acquainted 
with both these forms of Gnosticism, the Alexan- 
drian and the Syrian, we regard as an established 
fact of Christian history. To assume that Gnosticism 
was a heresy which dates from the second century, is 
preposterous. True, it was then first known by this 
name, and had crystallized into a perfect system. 
But for one hundred and fifty years before Christ, 
that is, from Aristobulus down to Philo, Judaism in 
its cross with Platoiiism had been giving birth to 
these forms of thought. They were as widely dif- 
fused as the Jewish-Greek literature ; that is, through 
the principal cities of the Roman Empire. The 
pages of Philo are colored with it. A community 
existed in his day which had cleared itself of the 



440 1^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL, 

hard rind of the Jewish ritual, and found their way, 
as they thought, directly to the heart of the Divine 
Love. There was every shade of hellenizing Juda- 
ism between the rugged literalists and this offshoot 
from them at Alexandria.^ 

That Paul would know the Gnostic tendencies of 
the Jewish religion, which he had professed in its 
most rigid ceremonials, is more than probable, even 
if we had found no indications of this knowledge in 
his writings. Apollos his fellow worker, had been 
a Jewish Hellenist, and was fresh from Alexandria. 
Paul quotes the Alexandrian version of the Old Tes- 
tament, in which the Apocrypha was included, a work 
full of Hellenisms, and in which the Logos as Wisdom 
was strongly personified, if not already hypostatized. 
There was a Hellenist synagogue at Jerusalem, of 
Alexandrians and Jews from the Egyptian province 
of Cyrene. It must have been crowded with wor- 

1 Aristobulus was an Alexandrian Jew, and peripatetic philosopher, 
who lived B. C. 170, and undertook to interject the Greek philosophy 
into Judaism, pretending that it was borrowed from Moses. Com- 
mentaries on the Pentateuch were forged in his name for the purpose 
of commending Moses to the Greeks. Some account of him may be 
found in Cudworth's Intellectual System^ i. 504. The Egyptian 
Therapeutae, once regarded by some writers by an absurd anach- 
ronism as Christian monks, were, as later writers have shown, con- 
templative Jews of the Philo-platonic school. They only indicate a 
general tendency here run to its extreme. Philo himself refers to 
them in his book De Vita Contempliva. They tried to find God after 
the Platonic and Gnostic method, by withdrawing from sense through 
an interior and secret way. They formed a community on the shores 
of Lake Moeris near Alexandria. 



THE PLATONIC COSMOLOGY. 441 

shippers during the days of the Jewish festivals when 
the Jews, scattered abroad, came up thither through 
all the thoroughfares of the Roman Empire. Hence 
on the day of Pentecost we find among the multitude 
who composed the audience of Peter, " Jews from 
Egypt and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene." 

Basilides, one of the early systemalizers of Platonic 
Gnosticism, pretends he borrowed his doctrine from 
Matthias the Apostle. Hippolytus is .authority for 
this.^ Moreover, Basilides produced an elaborate 
exposition of his system, a refutation of which was 
made by Agrippa Castor in the reign of Hadrian 
(i 17-138). It is certain then that one of the dis- 
tinguished apostles of Gnosticism had published his 
principal work soon after the close of the first cen- 
tury. He was in the flower of his age when John 
died, and was for some thirty or forty years a con- 
temporary of that Apostle. 

That John met the Gnostics at Ephesus, that they 
were there in considerable numbers and influence 
when he wrote, the evidence both external and in- 
ternal, is abundant and convincing.^ That the fourth 
Gospel, the Catholic Epistle, and the Apocalypse, set 
forth a cosmology and Christology calculated to dis- 
perse its shadows in a warmer and clearer illumi- 
nation, in the Epistle with a direct and conscious 
purpose, will we think, be apparent. 

1 See Biinsen's Hippolytus unci Seine Zeit^ i. p. 65. 

2 Eusebius, H. E. iii. 26. Read also in this connection, Polycarp's 
Epistle. 



CHAPTER IIL 

THE JOHANNEAN COSMOLOGY. 

THE Logos or Word, the term used by Philo and 
his Gnosticizing successors to designate the 
creative power, is found in the Septuagint. It cor- 
responds in part to the Nous of Plato, though it has 
a more full significance. The Nous of Plato is rea- 
son, simple and self-contained ; the Logos is reason 
in the process of self-revelation. The former may 
or may not, according to its connection, involve the 
idea of manifestation ; the latter necessarily implies 
a Being of whose mind it is the utterance and dis- 
closure. 

" In the beginning was the Word," is the first 
postulate of the fourth Gospel. Reason was at the 
origin of things, and intelligence was coordinate with 
being. "And the Word was with God." There 
never was a time when God was inclosed within him- 
self ; never any epoch of silent eternities when God 
was in repose ; never a state of inaction, or mere self- 
contemplation, out of which He had to rise and break 
silence. " And God was the Word." He could not 
be God except as one speaking, or imparting himself, 
and lavishing the wealth and glory of his own nature. 



THE yOHANNEAN COSMOLOGY, 443 

A God silent or self-inclosed were no God at all. He 
is only God as He is the Word, or in self-revelation. 
" The same was in the beginning with God/' The 
writer evidently reiterates this truth to give it em- 
phasis, as if it had been travestied or denied. If 
Reason were a co-essential of primal being, then the 
first evolution from the central life was not through 
an unconscious force, but a self-conscious Divine 
Intelligence. " All things were made by him,'' that 
is, by the Word. The Greek term, here rendered 
" made," does not mean constructed out of preexist- 
ing material. It involves the idea of original creation. 
All things by Him came into existence (eyeVero). The 
Cosmos is the language of God speaking. Nature 
through her infinitely varied forms is the forthgoing 
and exfiguration of the Divine reason in self-manifes- 
tation. " And without him nothing was made that 
was made." The Greek is still more emphatic. 
Without Him not one thing {pvl\ %v) existed that came 
into existence. The same was asserted in the fore- 
going clause affirmatively. Here it is declared neg- 
atively, and the notion of an outlying chaos is 
repudiated and thrust off by a double emphasis. 
Christianity at its inauguration rises pure from the 
least taint of dualism. '' And the Word was made 
flesh." It was not only in the beginning or in high- 
est and first things, but in last and lowest things 
It was in nature and in humanity, yea in humanity 
as its outermost form, here on the earth, where we 
gazed on its glory full of grace and truth. 



444 '^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. 

The introduction to the fourth Gospel, comprising 
what Chrysostom calls the Golden Proem, announces 
the prime doctrines which the narrative following is 
designed to establish and illustrate. They interpret 
the whole book, which keeps up to the high level of 
the introduction. Forms of speech are constantly 
occurring which would be entirely dark and enig- 
matical, were they not held steadily in the resolving 
light of the opening chapter. We do not believe this 
chapter was written with any direct reference to 
Gnosticism, or that it had any polemic purpose what- 
ever. That would have given it the coloring of the 
place and the time, whereas it formulates a cosmology 
which clears itself of all places and times, and of 
difficulties which baffle the wit of men in all ages of 
the world. We only say that these difficulties were 
rife when the fourth Gospel was written ; that the air 
was burdened with the fog of human speculation on 
these very themes ; that John must have known it ; 
that indirectly the whole Johannean theology stands 
negatively related to those speculations, and is more 
clearly understood when compared with them ; for 
they were the earliest mist which Christ'ianity cleared 
from its way as its first beams shot through its morn- 
ing sky. Let us now endeavor to bring out, and 
place in comparison with them, the features of this 
divine Cosmogony. 

I. The Supreme Divinity is here declared as never 
hidden, but always manifest. There is no secret way 



THE yOHANNEAN COSMOLOGY, 445 

into the divine love which only a few choice spirits 
can find by introversion, painful and difficult. It 
belongs to his essential nature to go out from him- 
self, and there was no antemundane period when He 
was not a creator. Hegel's doctrine that a God not 
creating is no God, was eighteen hundred years old 
when he announced it. The idea of a God existing 
alone through the cycles of revolving eternities, till, 
tired of the awful solitude. He rose out of it and pro- 
duced something which He could love, is one of the 
dismal conceptions of our finite understanding. In 
the beginning, at the point beyond which human 
thought is barred from going, the Divine was not 
separated from his Word ; He is not to be conceived 
except as going out of himself in creative speech re- 
plete with creative love. A being, employed through 
unimaginable years in the selfish pastime of inspect- 
ing his interior glories, is excluded from Christian 
thought, and a being who never was without his self- 
revealing Logos, is the first affirmation of Christian- 
ity.i 

II. As clearly, we conceive, does it affirm that 
this Logos is not a second god or sub-deity, but 
co-essential with the One Divine Nature. There is 
no Demiurgus to whom the work of world-making is 
delegated. That was the heresy of the time, de- 

1 It does not follow that God from eternity was creating human 
beings, or that the present system is coeval with Him, — a doctrine 
which Dr. Bushnell has pretty thoroughly refuted. 



446 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

signed to relieve God of being contaminated with 
the contact of matter, and at a later day the heresy 
of Arius, leaving God on the further side of an mi- 
known gulf and making nature stop short of Him as 
leading upward only to a finite intelligence. God 
was himself the Word — or, if we choose to make 
the subject and predicate change places, the Word 
was God. There is good authority, exegetical and 
grammatical, for reading the sentence either way. 
Either way it affirms the same thing, — that the 
divine Reason, which is essentially creative, is no in- 
ferior Demiurgus, but the Supreme Divinity. This 
same disciple says, in another connection, God is love. 
He means plainly that love is his essential nature ; 
He cannot exist without loving, for if He could He 
would not be God. He means here, we think, just as 
plainly, that Reason in self-manifestation is also his 
essential nature. He would not be God without his 
Logos. He is not bare goodness. He is not a mere 
fountain of life that flows blindly on and on. He is 
Reason as well, that guides it to ends supremely wise, 
and determines it in moulds of infinite beauty and 
order. 

HI. The notion of a divine carpenter or architect, 
an essential feature of Platonism, is excluded from 
the Johannean Cosmogony. God does not build nor 
manufacture. He creates. There is no preexistent 
material which He works into his universe. It is 
all the forthgoing of his own nature. The Cosmos 



I 



THE JOHANNEAN COSMOLOGY. 447 

is a divine speech that never breaks off into silence, 
and so nature is the daily thought of God in con- 
crete forms, the print and copy of the eternal mind. 
By making the Nous, or mere Intellect, the author 
of nature, God is only a contriver, a master-builder, 
whose plans are executed by inferior agents ; and 
the Platonic theism never gets out of this clumsy 
carpenter-work in constructing the universe. The 
first word of the Christian theism, the Logos, gets 
us rid of it, for the universe is now the language of 
God speaking ; and the old psalm only rounds out in- 
to a sublimer strain, " Day unto day uttereth speech, 
and night unto night showeth knowledge of thee." 

IV. Hence dualism is an impossibility. It had 
been the besetting vice, not alone of the Platonic 
system and of those which were built out of its ma- 
terial, but of every religion which had not swamped 
in Pantheism and found its unity there. Here it is 
announced that everything was spoken forth out of 
the Logos, which is none other than God himself in 
the act of speaking, and otherwise than by this process 
not one thing ever came into existence. Hence na- 
ture is sweet and clean, for it is God's thought in 
visible and concrete form, and it can have no taint 
unless man taints it with his own moral evil. The 
coverings of matter are not corrupt nor poisonous, 
but swathings that come fresh from the hand of the 
All-pure. Sense does not lure away from God, but 
wins us toward Him through avenues that open up- 



448 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

ward into the wealth of his own being. The flesh is 
no corrupt envelopment of the soul to smother and 
extinguish its divine ideals ; the Logos itself assumed 
it as its material clothing, and in it, and through it, 
the divine glory most truly and gracefully appeared. 
All this is involved in the propositions of the Golden 
Proem which the history following is to demonstrate. 
Gbd is in Last things as well as First ; in the End as 
in the Beginning ; on the outermost limits as at the 
divine centre, filling all things ; and the unity of God, 
nature, and man is to be consummated in Christianity. 
V. No MAN HAS EVER SEEN GoD. The infinite 
depths of divine Being are not merely beyond our 
comprehension, they are beyond the reach of objec- 
tive thought. God as the absolute, as sheer Nou- 
menon, is a word that presents no image to any 
finite mind. He is only to be apprehended through 
his attributes, for by these alone He comes into per- 
sonality. Inevitably, by the laws of thought and 
of speech these attributes must become personified 
when we think and speak of God. Qualities or 
attributes are what alone personify anything. Think 
away these attributes one by one. Love, Justice, 
Mercy, Wisdom, Truth, Beneficence, and the idea 
of God shades oif till it vanishes from thought 
altogether, and only a vast vacuity remains. You 
may believe it contains something, and you may call 
it the Absolute, but the word answers to nothing 
in your own mind. The vacuity there has become 



THE yOHANNEAN COSMOLOGY, 449 

complete. Hegel is right, therefore, so far as our 
own minds stand affected ; when after thinking 
away all the qualities of Divine Being to find the 
essence within them, he comes at last to nothing, 
and makes zero the ground of all existence. Only 
we should have the grace to acknowledge, after this 
process is accomplished, that we are the vacuum, and 
that the zero is only in ourselves. 

Hence there is not an attribute which in the Bible 
is not made to image forth the divine nature, and 
which for the time being is not made to stand for the 
person of God. It is God himself, as if for the end 
in view the whole Deity were there. He is Wisdom. 
It is not enough to say He is wise, for Wisdom is his 
eternal essence. But again, Wisdom is his daughter ; 
she was with Him when He prepared the heavens, 
she was " as one brought up with him, his daily delight 
rejoicing always before him." ^ As the daughter of 
God, she is described at large in the apocryphal 
writings as doing what elsewhere God is declared 
to have done himself. But again, God is Light.^ 
Because all our illumination is in Him, Light for this 
end expresses the whole Deity, as we say the sun is 
the light of the world. Again, He is Love ; ^ for to 
say only that He loves, does not affirm sufficiently 
his eternal essence. And yet again as to his retribu- 
tive justice, he is a " consuming fire." * 

1 Proverbs viii. 30. ^ i John i. 5. ^ lb. iv. 16. 

* Heb. xii. 29 quoted from Deut. iv. 24. 
29 



4SO THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

But when it is said that God is the Word, or the 
infinite Mind, in the act of revelation all the other 
personifications are comprehended in one. For 
everything that can be known of Him comes through 
the Logos, — God speaking, — the Divine Reason in 
manifestation. All the riches of his nature, love, 
justice, truth, tenderness, grace, beneficence, must 
come through his Word, for it stands as the forthgo- 
ing of all that is known or knowable of the Divine 
perfections. Hence it is described as " dwelling on 
the bosom of the Father" and alone revealing Him, 
just as the photosphere on the sun's disc, ever gen- 
erated from its unknowable deeps, floods our uni- 
verse and warms it with solar day. Hence the Word 
is the only-begotten of the Father, and it was no 
paradox of the Christian fathers when they called it 
eternally begotten ; for they only say over again in 
different phrase that it was " in the beginning," and 
that God never insulated himself in dreary solitude. 
Hence in the New Testament the word is the son of 
God and in the fourth Gospel the only son. He is 
never spoken of as made, or created ; he is always 
born or begotten ; not born in time, but born eter- 
nally and always out of the infinite deeps of divine 
Being, and thus ever becoming to our finite minds 
the resplendent Person of the Godhead. 

A question here very naturally occurs : How 
came these divine metaphysics to be first enunciated 
by a fisherman of Galilee 'i All that has been told 



THE yOHANNEAN COSMOLOGY. 451 

US of the Platonism or the Gnosticism of the fourth 
Gospel turns out the most baseless of all assump- 
tions. If you except Plato's monotheism, the fourth 
Gospel sets aside those systems as to their dis- 
tinguishing features, cuts its way through the fog 
which they had diffused, and rises above them into 
the clear sky like one of those peaks of light, that 
first catch the day-spring and fling it down on the 
shadows below. A distinguishing feature of Platon- 
ism is its dualism, and this became more hopeless 
the longer it developed, till finally it turned God out 
of his universe, and shut the door. Take dualism 
out of Plato and he is no longer Plato. His carpen- 
ter-work falls in pieces and vanishes from sight, and 
leaves the Demiurgus without a stone or a timber to 
build with. Put it never so slightly into the Johan- 
nean cosmology and the whole system would be 
changed and corrupted as if poison had been diffused 
through a living organism to dissolve its tissues. 
There never was the least color of it in any of those 
theologies which were wrought from the fourth Gos- 
pel, not even in the Alexandrian school, which was 
thought to Platonize the most ; for neither Clement 
nor Justin nor Origen have the least smell of it upon 
their garments. 

If we turn to the opening chapter of the Apoca- 
lypse, we shall be at no loss in ascertaining the 
source of the Johannean cosmology. It is all there, 
but in different form, given not in metaphysical prop- 



452 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

ositions, but in the glowing symbols of an objective 
world. Here the disciple who had leaned on the 
breast of the Master says he was in spirit, as the old 
prophets were when they saw truth in its represen- 
tative imagery ; that he heard a voice saying " I 
am the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the 
Omega, the First and the Last — not only eV dp/crj, 
that is, in the prime principles of being, but in their 
lowest and outermost ultimations. At the divine 
centre as at the utmost circuit of a living universe, 
I fill all things with myself." The writer says he 
turned and looked and saw what afterward he called 
the Logos represented as a human form entirely 
glorified ; " his hairs as white as wool and his feet 
as if they burned in a furnace " — glorified, that is, 
even" to its ultimations. The unity of God nature 
and humanity is the one comprehensive truth, given 
in one case as divine metaphysics, given in the other 
by prophetic vision and symbol, whose overwhelming 
brightness was as the sun shining in his strength. 

The Logos-doctrine was not first enunciated in 
the fourth Gospel. It only received here its final and 
most perfect formulation. The substance of it under 
different phraseology was evidently in possession of 
the earliest Christian communions, and they grasped 
it as the prime essential of Christianity itself It 
is implied, as we have shown, though not given in its 
completeness, in the discourse of Christ, as reported 
by Matthew, where instead of the Word " the Son," 
is the phraseology employed. 



THE JOHANNEAN COSMOLOGY, 453 

Paul was in full possession of the doctrine twenty- 
five years at least before the fourth Gospel was writ- 
ten. His letter to the Colossians, whose genuineness 
is admitted even by the doubting and fastidious 
Renan, and asserted by all the ancient authorities 
without exception, must have been produced not far 
from the year 65. It is so full of nerve and so robust 
with the Pauline spirit, that Baur's reasons for setting 
it aside we must regard as entirely baseless. It was 
written to chide the heresies which were plaguing the 
church at Colosse, among which were angel-worship 
and false asceticism — the doctrines of which had 
long been gendered in the cross between Judaism 
and Platonism, and which entered so largely into the 
Gnostic systems of a later day. It is plain that he 
alludes to their celestial hierarchies and world- 
makers, when at the name of the " well beloved Son " 
the mind of the Apostle takes fire in this burst of in- 
spiration — " Who is the image of the invisible God, 
the first-born of the whole creation ; for in him were 
all things created ; things in the heavens and things 
on the earth ; things visible and things invisible ; 
whether they be thrones or dominations, or princi- 
palities or powers ; in him and for him were all cre- 
ated. And he is before all things, and in him all 
things hold together (o-vvio-TrjKi), And he is the head 
of the body, the church, for he is the beginning, the 
first born from the dead, that in all things he may 
be preeminent. For the Father was pleased that in 
him the whole pleroma should dwell." 



454 '^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL, 

To say that the Apostle is here only describing a 
moral creation would be to sink the passage far away 
from its full meaning. It is plain that he had ob- 
tained some vision of the truth which John saw in 
serener light. The Christ represents to his mind 
not merely a man born in time, but the creative 
Word, the divine Reason in manifestation, and as 
such he opposes it to the angel-worship of an incip- 
ient Gnosticism which made the creative Word one 
of the pleroma, an angel of the heavenly hierarchies. 
There is no reason to doubt that before Paul's day 
Jewish Platonism had ripened into just that result. 

We waive for the pres'ent the question of identity 
between the Christ and the Word, and why these 
two terms became perfectly interchangeable. Such 
certainly is the fact which meets us in the earliest 
symbolization which sets forth the sublime theism of 
Christianity. Paul perfectly anticipates the theogony 
of the Golden Proem. The Word here called " the 
well-beloved Son '' is the first born of the whole cre- 
ation, the primal emanation or offspring of the Eternal 
Mind to image forth its invisible deeps ; through whom 
the heavens in all their ranks were constituted, and 
all things of time and sense — all things visible and 
invisible. And in him all things stand together, or 
are held in order. Not only the universe visible and 
invisible is created in and through the Word, but all 
its parts are held to each other in harmonious rela- 
tions. It is the same as if the Apostle had said — All 



THE JOHANNEAN COSMOLOGY. 455 

things visible and invisible are instinct with the liv- 
ing mind out of which they came, and they are held 
to one divine purpose and end. The all-creating 
Word is behind and within the shifting panorama of 
nature and of history, making all things and all 
events stand together as held in unity. 

The Epistle to the Hebrews is beyond all reason- 
able question a production of the apostolic age, and 
probably written by a cotemporary of Paul. We 
think it antedates the fourth Gospel by nearly a 
quarter of a century. Its introductory chapter as- 
serts the Logos doctrine with the clearest emphasis, 
and as we read it is exactly parallel with the utter- 
ance of Paul just quoted. "The Son" is above all 
angels, and by him God " made the worlds." ^ And 
the Father addresses the Son in the words, " Thy 
throne, O God, is forever and ever," and again " Thou 
Lord in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the 
earth (jr\v yrjv ) and the heavens (ovpavGl) are the works 
of thy hands." The Word here called " the Son " is 
invested with the same attributes as in the proem of 
John. 

1 That Tohs alayas, here rendered "the worlds," means the whole 
creation, may be seen by reference to Heb. xi. 3, where the same 
word is used. It may mean " the ages " or the whole flow of time. 
But see as decisive the tenth verse of Chapter first. We are perfect- 
ly aware of a different application of these texts made by one class of 
expositors, but it strikes us as entirely arbitrary. 



I 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE TRANSPARENCIES OF NATURE. 

NATURE, as we have defined it, is the material 
plane of being which we apprehend by the 
organs of sense, and the order of sequence in its end- 
less changes and recombinations we call natural 
laws. To ascertain these laws and group them is 
the business of natural science. And it is only 
science pretending to knowledge beyond its discovery 
that antagonizes the truths of revelation. The best 
scientific research and progress do not tend down- 
ward towards a grosser materialism, but away from it 
towards the highest spiritual philosophy, and the line 
becomes almost tremulous, which distinguishes the 
discoveries of science from the disclosures of revela- 
tion, where the light of the one is merging in the 
clear blaze of the other. 

No such elements of nature exist as the ancient 
philosophers built their systems with ; none such as 
entered into the cosmology of Plato ; no such fixed 
primordial elements as earth, air, fire, and water ; no 
ultimate particles of matter, out of which Leibnitz 
and others of a later day wrought their atomic theo- 
ries of the universe. Nature presents to us her ever 



THE TRANSPARENCIES OF NATURE. 457 

shifting phenomena ; a new phasis every day and 
every hour, through which something benign and 
lovely is looking out upon us ; and what that some- 
thing is becomes a question, in answering which re- 
ligion and science were never so much in accord as 
now. 

Our text books told us not many years since that 
material substances were classified as those which 
could be weighed^ and those which could not be. 
The imponderable substances were Hght, heat, elec- 
tricity apd magnetism, whose particles were exceed- 
ingly subtile, and travelled with immense velocity. 
It is now perfectly well demonstrated, that no such 
substances exist in nature. They are only the equiv- 
alents oi forces producing motion ; and the light, the 
heat, the electricity, and the magnetism measure by 
their degrees of intensity the amount of force which 
has been resisted and deflected. If you stir the at- 
mosphere by the vibratory motion of your vocal 
organs, or of a stringed instrument, or by the 
concussion of bodies with each other, you produce 
wavelets of air, which' striking the ear produce the 
sensation of sound. Sound is not a material sub- 
stance, but motion resisted. The subtile ethers per- 
vading all the spaces between us and the sun are 
acted upon by some force in that central orb, and the 
motion touching our eye-balls produces the sensation 
of light, or touching the surface of our bodies the 
sensation of heat Light and heat are not material 
substances, but motion resisted. 



45 8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

Or let the resisting medium be varied according to 
laws well ascertained, and the heat becomes elec- 
tricity. This change in the resisting medium may 
be effected by an artificial electric battery, or by 
states of the atmosphere which is one of the electric 
batteries of nature. Or vary the resisting medium 
yet again, and the electricity changes back into 
light, shown either by sparks from the electric wires, 
or by flashes of lightning throifgh the air. The 
impact of homogeneous bodies by friction produces 
heat, that of heterogeneous bodies produpes elec- 
tricity, and two currents of electricity meeting at 
right angles, produce magnetism. What were once 
called imponderable substances therefore are simply 
motion resisted ; or force changing its form of man- 
ifestation according to the method or medium by 
which the resistance is made. So much heat, or so 
much light, or so much electricity are the equiva- 
lents of so much force arrested ; and so subtile and 
exact have been the experiments, that the equivalents 
are weighed and noted down. Joule, an English 
chemist, by a series of exceedingly delicate experi- 
ments, tells us by his calorimeter what quantity of 
heat is produced by a given mechanical action ; and 
he demonstrates he thinks that the fall of 772 pounds 
through the space of one foot is able to raise the 
temperature of one pound of water through one 
degree of Fahrenheit' s thermometer. 

The analysis does not stop here. The heat, elec- 



THE TRANSPARENCIES OF NATURE. 459 

tricity and magnetism of our own bodies, all, in fine, 
that we call the vital force, are resolvable into the 
same general law. So much bodily temperature is 
so much force whose motion has been arrested ; so 
much nerve-power or brain-power is so much elec- 
tricity or magnetism, the equivalent of so much 
motion converted into the vis vitce of our physical 
organism. Our activities either of mind or body are 
just so much heat, electricity, or magnetism con- 
verted back into motion. Touch the nerves of a 
corpse with the galvanic wires, and you produce the 
same motions of the body that the will produced 
in the living man. The difference is, that the brain 
of the living man, which was the electric battery be- 
fore, has now failed of its supply, and an artificial 
battery has been substituted in its place. The emo- 
tions and passions of the living man moved the 
muscles of the face so as to express fear, anger, or 
rage, and this was done by the electric action of the 
corresponding nerves : touch the same nerves of the 
corpse with the electric wires, and the same muscles 
will move again into the same expression. Vital 
heat like all other heat is the exact equivalent of so 
much motion ; nerve power and brain power are the 
same equivalent converted to electricity or magnet- 
ism, the power on which we draw in all our thoughts, 
emotions, intellections, and imaginations. Organic 
life is the equilibrium of these equivalents, and to 
breakdown and destroy the equilibrium is — death. 



460 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

So, therefore, what were called the imponderable 
substances, are not substances at all, but simply force 
changing its mode of manifestation ; first into mo- 
tion, then into the equivalents of motion, heat, light, 
electricity, magnetism, vital power. These in turn 
change back severally into motion again. The evo- 
lution of force by heat and electricity converted again 
into motion by the telegraph, the steam engine, mus- 
cular action, or on the more magnificent scale of 
nature, is only the illustration of a general law which 
science now holds to be perfectly demonstrated — 
that force once exeHed never ceases and is never lost. 
In some of its equivalents it is always preserved, and 
produces the endless phases in the cycle of life that 
ever returns into itself, and constitutes the activities 
of a living universe. This is the correlation and 
CONSERVATION OF FORCES ; in Other words, their 
equivalence and eternal continuance, whose discovery 
and demonstration is the auspicious achievement of 
modern science. 

. So much of what were called imponderable sub- 
stances. But what are called the ponderable or 
solid substances, the rocks, the minerals, the earths 
and the flora that grow out of them — are resolva- 
ble in the last analysis into force changing the 
form of its manifestation. That is the last boundary 
of science, and beyond this as mere physicists, we 
cannot go. Matter has no ultimate units, but is 
divisible to the point where it vanishes from human 



THE TRANSPARENCIES OF NATURE. 46 1 

perception. All the properties of matter, primary 
and secondary, are but the manifestations of force, 
and we know of no such entity as the essence of 
matter. The most solid and ponderable substances 
are resolvable, the solids into fluids, the fluids into 
vapor, the vapor into gases, and the gases into ethers, 
and the ethers into those more simple and element- 
ary, and very possibly a finer and more complete 
analysis will some day resolve all the ponderable 
substances into the imponderable. What we have 
called matter, is composed of no fixed and final 
atoms that we know of; it is a coordination of forces 
which may be recombined or changed into their 
equivalents. Thus the most enlightened material- 
ism tends to spiritualism and almost merges in it. 
But come to the last analysis. These coordinate 
forces are resolvable one into another and all of them 
abut upon a Prime Force which lies within and 
behind them all ; of which they are only the ever 
changing phases and out of which all phenomena 
are evolved. The single question, which now con- 
cerns us is — What is the nature and quality of this 
Prime Force, towards which all the others are re- 
solvable as only the forms and methods of its ac- 
tivity } Herbert Spencer says it is unknowable, 
and that Science is here brought up to its im- 
passable boundary. But why unknowable .? The 
question is, does it act unintelligently, like brute 



462 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

matter, or does it not ? The answer is — it acts as 
a vast and all pervading intelligence, so compre- 
hending and stupendous that we must call it infi- 
nite. Take as an illustration the planetary motions. 
It is demonstrable that if the force which holds the 
planets toward a common centre and the force which 
projects them from it, were not kept in equipoise 
within assignable limits, the whole system would 
tumble into chaos. It is demonstrable that if their 
periodic revolutions had been coincident, so as to 
arrange them on the same side of the sun, that 
is to bring them in conjunction, the whole system 
would break up in a common disaster. It is de- 
monstrable that the whole system is one of the 
most delicate balances and compensations, so that 
seeming temporal disturbance preserves an intrin- 
sic and eternal harmony. Some of their compensa- 
tions and balances forecast periods of thousands of 
years. For example the orbits and periodic times 
of Jupiter and Saturn are such that they may be 
in conjunction and send disturbance through the 
whole planetary system. But every third conjunc- 
tion falls in advance of a former one and the conjunc- 
tion point is carried round the entire orbit in 2,648 
years, at the end of which time the exact condition 
will be restored and all the perturbations will have 
completely neutralized each other. Such illustra- 
tions might be multiplied indefinitely, so as to show 
how this Prime Force into which all other forces 



4 

THE TRANSPARENCIES OF NATURE, 463 

resolve themselves, is an all-seeing intelligence.^ It 
answers precisely to the Logos of Scripture, the Di- 
vine Reason in the act of manifestation. The light 
of science tending upward meets that of revela- 
tion streaming downward and they blend together. 
Matter, the more we analyze it, loses its grossness 
and becomes transparent, showing the motions un- 
covered of Him who works in us and around us ; 
and nature is only the veil with which we cover our 
eyes, that we be not too much dazzled or overawed 
under the open face of the Godhead. 

Consider one moment another point Science, we 
said, demonstrates the conservation, or, as Herbert 
Spencer calls it, the persistence of force. This 
means that, so far as science knows, the same amount 
of force now in the universe always has been and 
always must be. It is constantly changing in form 
but never in quantity.^ Motion arrested changes into 
heat ; but if you could utilize all the heat you could 
produce precisely the same degree of motion again. 

1 See Mitchell's Popular Astronomy , especially chap. xv. 

2 Professor Yeomans thus states concisely the same law: "The 
movements we see around us are not spontaneous, or independent 
occurrences, but links in an eternal chain of forces. When bodies 
are put in motion it is at the expense of some previously existing 
energy ; and when they come to rest, their force is not destroyed 
but lives on in other forms. Every motion we see has its thermal 
value, and when it ceases its equivalent of heat is an invariable re- 
sult. Should the motion of the heavenly bodies be arrested, it would 
produce a conflagration of the universe." — Chemistry y^^. 174. 



464 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

Solid matter changes into gases and ethers ; but 
condense the gases and the same amount of matter 
returns and nothing has been lost. There is the 
same now, no more no less, that there was when 
the morning stars first sang together ; and the same 
would continue though the world should be " burned 
up." The only changes have been in the combi- 
nations, each combination offering a new phasis of 
the vast primal force of all. The annihilation of 
matter is impossible, for no such substance in se 
exists or was ever created. The destruction of the 
world is both scientifically unthinkable and theo- 
logically monstrous. It is saying, to state it other- 
wise, that the ground force which comprehends all 
the others, and from which phenomena are evolved, 
could cease, or is not '^persistent',' and that is say- 
ing theologically, that the -Logos was not in the 
Beginning, or is not born eternally, but is only 
finite and temporal ; that it began to be, once on 
a time, and that it can cease to be or can die out 
again ; that God could be without it ; that the es- 
sential divine attributes, those which make him God, 
could be abolished ; that the Divine Mind could 
introvert within itself in the lonely and selfish con- 
templation of its interior glories ; nay, farther, that 
its interior glories could themselves be quenched, 
for it is precisely their lavishment that makes them 
beneficent and therefore essentially divine. 

Such, then, are the symphonic affirmations of 



THE TRANSPARENCIES OF NATURE. 465 

Theology and Science. Theology declares that God 
IS essentially the Word, was ever in self- manifesta- 
tion that is, and always must be ; that there was no 
primordial material outside of him, but that all 
things came into being by the Word ; or in other 
phrase, that the Prime Force of Nature is God in the 
act of speaking. So John announces from above. 
Science begins from below, and reasons up towards 
the same truth. Nature is some vast Power in ac- 
tion ; its phases change constantly, but it is only a 
change of equivalents, the sum total is the same 
yesterday, to-day, and forever. Nothing can be taken 
away. Creation was not an act which was accom- 
plished centuries ago, but is an ever fresh evolution 
of the central power of the Universe, acting not 
blindly, but as the utterance of an Eternal Reason. 
Creation is a grand epopee, a song which has no be- 
ginning and no languishing, but whose notes, run- 
ning through an infinite range of keys, make the 
harmonies of the universe. " The discoveries and 
generalizations of modern Science,'' says Professor 
Tyndall, '^ constitute a poem more sublime than has 
ever yet been addressed to the imagination," and he 
sums up his conclusions in a noble passage which 
we quote as a fitting close to this chapter : — 

" We pass to other systems and other suns, each 

pouring forth energy like our own, but still without 

infringement of the law which reveals immutability 

in the midst of change, which recognizes incessant 

30 



466 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

transference or conversion, but neither final gain nor 
loss. The law generalizes the aphorism of Solomon 
that ' there is nothing new under the sun,' by teach- 
ing us to detect everywhere, under its infinite variety 
of appearances, the same primeval force. To Nature 
nothing can be added ; from Nature nothing can be 
taken away ; the sum of her energies is constant, and 
the utmost man can do in the pursuit of physical 
truth, or in the applications of physical knowledge, is 
to shift the constituents of the never-varying total. 
The law of conservation rigidly excludes both crea- 
tion (temporal beginning) and annihilation. Waters 
may change to ripples, and ripples to waves ; mag- 
nitude may be substituted for number and number 
for magnitude ; asteroids may aggregate to suns ; 
suns may resolve themselves into flora and fauna, 
and flora and fauna melt into air, — the flux of 
power is eternally the same. It rolls in music 
through the ages ; and all terrestrial energy — the 
manifestations of life, as well as the display of phe- 
nomena — are but modulations of its rhythm." 



CHAPTER V. 

THE WORD MADE FLESH. 

'T'^HAT Jesus Christ was a man, finite, tempted, 
-■- suffering, having the same propensities and 
weaknesses, the same wants and sympathies that 
other men have, is manifest through the whole 
evangeHc narrative. He was more of a man than 
any other person of whom we have any history ; for 
nowhere else do we read of a humanity where the 
compass of its powers and attributes was so full and 
complete. Its sublimest heights of moral grandeur, 
and its most delicate shades of moral beauty are all 
here. The manhood of other men, even the best of 
them, is somewhat distorted or defective. There is 
strength without tenderness, there is breadth with- 
out depth ; there is intensity without catholicity ; 
there is clear intellection without the sweet and 
fervent sympathies of the heart. The peculiarity of 
the manhood of Jesus consists in the union of quali- 
ties found elsewhere incongruous and in separation ; 
union in such majestic and delicate proportion as to 
give the impression of perfect symmetry and har- 
mony. It requires not only a life-long study, but 
a heart open to all that is grand and lovely in nature 



468 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

and in man, to be brought into full correspondency 
with the humanity of Jesus. This constitutes the 
charm of the writings of Dr. Furness, through whom 
the natural life and character of Jesus become to us 
a new revelation of moral beauty and perfection. 
Some of the critics have assumed that the fourth 
Gospel denies, or at least ignores the humanity of 
Jesus ; that it has a Gnostic tinge, and imports that 
his relations to space and time, to sense and matter, 
were apparent and not real. Every candid and 
careful reader we are persuaded will come to just 
the opposite conclusion. More plainly and persist- 
ently than the synoptics, do the fourth Gospel and all 
the Johannean writings, set forth the Incarnation as 
a stubborn and fundamental fact, for the plain reason 
that when John wrote, the fact had been denied ; 
and in the Gnostic metaphysics, the essential human- 
ity of Jesus had exhaled in gilded mist and become 
spectral. • In the proem the fact is made prominent ; 
and John even goes out of his way to put in his own 
personal attestations as an eye-witness. " The Word 
was made flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld 
HIS GLORY." He puts this in the foreground as a 
postulate which the entire history following was to 
establish. When he comes to narrate the sufferings 
and death of Jesus, he purposely gives his readers to 
understand, that he of all the twelve was an eye- 
witness, standing under the cross while the others 
were standing afar ofl". Hence he supplies facts 



THE WORD MADE FLESH. 469 

which they had left out ; and he not only supplies 
them, but interlines his personal affirmation, as if 
making oath to what somebody had denied. " One 
of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and 
immediately blood and water came out. And he 
who saw bears testimony, and his testimony is true 
and he knows that he speaks the truth!' ^ He seeks to 
confirm this in his description of the post-resurrec- 
tion appearances, when Jesus came among his disci- 
ples, and showed them his hands and his side. The 
Catholic epistle opens with the same attestations, and 
it is one of the proofs of identity of authorship, that 
all the Johannean writings lay special emphasis upon 
the proper humanity of Jesus down to its outermost 
clothings of flesh and sense. The ears, the eyes, and 
the touch are the threefold witness summoned to* 
bear testimony to the fact that the incarnation was 
not spectral, but actual. "That which we have 
heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we 
have looked upon, and our hands have handled we 
announce to you." He denounces as antichrist those 
who deny that " Jesus Christ has come in the flesh," 
and he makes acknowledgment of this truth a test 
of genuine discipleship.^ The " liars " who denied 
that Jesus was the Christ, or who called themselves 
apostles and were not,^ were, in all probability, the 
followers of Cerinthus, who made Jesus one person, 

^ I John xix. 34, 35. ^ I John iv. 1-3. 

^ I John ii. 22 ; Rev. ii. 2. 



470 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

and the Christ another person that merely spoke 
through him as a higher angel, but whose immacu- 
late garments of light had never been soiled by the 
overlayings of mortal and corruptible flesh. If the 
Johannean spirit rises, on the one hand, into the 
more celestial ethers, it descends on the other hand, 
into a realism as crass and solid as we find anywhere 
in the New Testament history. Jesus Christ on the 
side of his humanity, is a partaker of flesh and blood, 
and through that of the weaknesses, the temptations, 
and the woes, which beset the race of Adam, even 
to its humblest and most forlorn child of sorrow. 

In the fourth Gospel, as nowhere else, Jesus is de- 
scribed as in constant peril of his life, and evading the 
snares that would bring it to a close before his time 
had come. He begins his ministry at Jerusalem, 
evidently in the expectation that his own people 
would be the first to receive the new revelation, and 
that the light of the New Jerusalem would radiate 
from the old, and thence roll back the pagan dark- 
ness. But he is opposed, thwarted and threatened, 
and a plot laid for his life, which he is obliged con- 
tinually to evade ; and he finally leaves Jerusalem, 
ceases to make it the centre of his plans and opera- 
tions, retires to the obscure province of Galilee for 
personal safety, organizes his ministry there, and 
only goes up privately to Jerusalem, the focus of 
danger. All this we have in the fourth Gospel with 
fullness of detail ; while in the synoptics we only 



I 



THE WORD MADE FLESH. 



471 



have it in hints and fragments. How baseless is the 
theory which regards it as a Gnostic production de- 
signed to show that Christ was not really incarnate 
and subject to suffering and death, when the whole 
narrative represents that the plan of his ministry was 
constantly varied lest he should meet death prema- 
turely ! Then the assertion, that in the fourth Gos- 
pel he breaks suddenly upon the reader as super- 
human or superangelic, is entirely unfounded, for no 
Scripture shows more plainly and constantly than 
this book, that his Messianic consciousness came like 
the dawn of the morning, that it had to break through 
clouds of temptation and of ignorance ; through 
alternations of doubt, of hope and of fear ; through 
all the limitations of the finite understanding, before 
the unfluctuating noontide flooded his consciousness 
with the wisdom and the peace of God. The fourth 
Gospel shows preeminently and in the lowest degree 
the human phasis in the life and character of Jesus 
Christ. 

But it contains also another range of fact and doc- 
trine pertaining to that life and character which we 
cannot reduce within the dimensions of our finite 
nature. The synoptics rise sometimes to the same 
height, but they only rise to it occasionally. It ap- 
pears with them in solitary peaks, far off beyond the 
clouds ; whereas in John it is a continuous range, 
always bathed in the mellowing glories of the hea- 
vens. In the proem, Jesus Christ is the Word, and 



472 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

the Word is God himself. He is not an angel or 
aeon, but the Being who creates the universe. This 
might perhaps be explained as a rhetorical figure, were 
it not tRat a whole range of fact and doctrine, through 
the fourth Gospel, and through all the Johannean 
writings, keeps up to the same level, showing plainly 
that the proem was given as a key for the interpre- 
tation of the whole. Jesus asserts repeatedly his pre- 
existence. " I came down from heaven " is the an- 
nunciation which startles his hearers and excites the 
Jews to anger and charges of blasphemy ; but he 
repeats it in its sharp significance, and will not ex- 
plain it as metaphor. He asserts an existence of 
his own before that of Abraham ; and the connec- 
tion shows that he does not mean merely that he 
was the Messiah in the counsel and foreknowledge 
of God, but that he had an existence which was with- 
out time, and therefore was before Abraham. In 
those communings with God, which Jesus had at the 
last supper, communings of indescribable tenderness, 
where no factitious self-assertion is even conceivable, 
he speaks of his preexistence as a familiar fact, but 
now glowing more vividly and gratefully in his con- 
sciousness, " I have glorified thee on the earth, I 
have finished the work which thou gavest me to do, 
and now,'0 Father, glorify thou me with thyself, 
with the glory which I had with thee before the 
world was.'* ^ " Father, I would that those which 

1 John xvii. 5. 



THE WORD MADE FLESH, 473 

thou hast given me be with me where I am, that 
they may behold my glory, which thou hast given 
me, for thou lovedst me before the foundation of 
the world." ^ To say that an order of events was 
established from all eternity in the decrees of God, 
is only to assert the common dogma of predestina- 
tion. Jesus does more than this, unless he asserts 
the baldest truism, for every Jew who took up the 
stones to stone him for blasphemy, might have 
claimed such preexistence as that. That which he 
calls repeatedly himself, — which was so far forth his 
own being, that he applies to it the personal pro- 
noun, — I, he says, was with the Father before time 
was ; and when death was near, he said he was going 
back to merge again in the glory from which he 
emerged when he took on the clothings of our finite 
humanity. " I have come forth from the Father, and 
come into the world: again I leave the world and go 
to the Father ; " and his disciples said on hearing 
this, " Now speakest thou plainly, and art speaking 
no parable." ^ Passages may be quoted which fall 
upon the ear at first as like forms of speech, such as 
" the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." 
Even there, other preexistence is supposed than one 
merely in the foreknowledge of God.^ But the pas- 

1 John xvii. 24. ^ John xvi. 28-29. 

3 This passage imports as we interpret it, that God did not merely 
provide a sacrifice in time and once for all, but that eternally, he sac- 
rifices himself for his creatures ; that such is his nature always, and 
the cross only symbolizes it in time. 



474 '^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. 

sages are not parallel. When Jesus persistently 
asserted his preexistence, and was charged with 
blasphemy, and his life was imperiled because he put 
forth so hard a doctrine, he yet refused to retract it, 
but asserted it over and over till the last. Coming 
forth from the Father into the world he places in 
antithesis with leaving the world and going to the 
Father. One member of the antithesis is placed in 
balance with the other ; preexistence is asserted in 
the same sense as his post-existence, and if one was 
real, the other must also be. 

But why go into any verbal interpretations 1 The 
egoism of the Johannean writings is so stupendous 
and persistent, that we are shut off to the conclusion 
that if Christ was a " mere man " though a sage or 
prophet, he was a man whose self-assertion transcend- 
ed all the bounds of reason and modesty. For what 
is the bearing of sage or prophet who have any just 
apprehension of their function and calling .? Accord- 
ing to the depth and fullness of their wisdom and 
inspiration, so will the entireness of their self-abne- 
gation be. As the divine mind and message roll in 
upon them, their own nothingness becomes more 
complete ; they keep themselves out of the way lest 
they sink under the awful burden of the Divine 
Word. " Woe is me for I am undone ; because I am 
a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a 
people of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the 
King, the Lord of hosts." No mere man can bear 



THE WORD MADE FLESH. 475 

the weight of the infinite without being crushed and 
consumed under it. Even the sage who comes into a 
larger discourse of reason bows before it in profound 
acknowledgment that it is not his reason, but a loftier 
and diviner intelligence,' and he shrinks from project- 
ing his little ego into it, to darken its lustre. But 
much more will the seer keep himself out of sight 
before the incoming of the Lord, for he sees and 
speaks from a more profound and irrepressible spon- 
taneity, and he is more ready to " fall as dead " than 
to see his own fantastic figure outlined on the hea- 
venly vision. 

Nor would it make any difference in this respect, 
though the messenger who speaks in the name of 
God, were angelic or superangelic. If greater and 
wiser than men, so much more perfect would his 
self-abnegation be. The highest angels (so we inter- 
pret the Saviour's words), those who are nearest the 
Lord and reflect most brightly the glories of his face, 
are the guardians of little children, because they are 
most childlike and are brought more directly and 
entirely into sympathy and correspondency with the 
little ones. And so to become great or greatly an- 
gelic is not to rise into greater self-assertion, but to 
rise to such a consciousness of God, that when made 
the minister of his truth and will, all selfhood — the 
I — vanishes and disappears. 

But what have we here as we open the Johannean 
writings ? We have an egoism for which the synop- 



476 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

tics had in some sort prepared us, but which is con- 
summated in the book of John. Matthew reports 
Jesus as saying : " No one knoweth the Son but the 
Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save 
the Son, and he to whom the Son shall reveal him." 
" Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden." But in the fourth Gospel the proem is 
pitched to this high strain, and the discourse of Jesus 
rises up to it even to the close. He tells his dis - 
ciples that to see him is the same as seeing God, and 
instead of abnegating himself he puts himself in the 
foreground continually. He does not tell his hearers 
that simply to receive his message will be enough. 
He tells them that " all men should honor the Son 
even as they honor the Father," for "he that honoreth 
not the Son honoreth not the Father who hath sent 
him." He does not say, I bring you the true doc- 
trine which is bread from heaven, but rather " I am 
the bread which came down from heaven." " I am the 
bread of life." He does not bring news merely that 
there is to be a resurrection of the dead. He pro- 
claims rather " I am the resurrection and the life." He 
does not tell his disciples as any mere preacher would 
have told them, — If you are obedient to the truth, 
God will vouchsafe to you a resurrection among the 
glorified ; he tells them as to every man who is a true 
believer, " I will raise him up at the last day." He 
does not say in prophetic style, — I proclaim truth 
which is to enlighten mankind ; he proclaims rather 



THE WORD MADE FLESH. 477 

" I am the light of the world." Instead of withdraw- 
ing his own personality, that the light may shine un- 
broken from the mind of God, he interposes his person 
as if there alone the light was inorbed, and became 
the sun of the moral universe. 

These stupendous claims are made not in excep- 
tional and rhetorical phraseology, but they are based 
on the alleged prime facts of the gospel history. The 
last festal discourses abound in promises of the Holy 
Spirit that was to comfort, enlighten, and sanctify the 
disciples of Christ. But who is this man who claims 
that he is the dispenser of this sovereign agency of 
God, and that its coming depends on his own per- 
sonal agency 1 '' If I go not away the Comforter will 
not come, but if I depart / will send him!' Yet again 
the Father is to send him, but it is to be only through 
the intervention of Christ, and in his name. What 
these promises imported, and how the disciples un- 
derstood them, we learn by the subsequent fulfillment 
The time and place where the new dispensation was 
to be inaugurated was Jerusalem, at the feast of Pen- 
tecost — and there it came, the imbreathing of heav- 
enly airs transforming the whole inward and outward 
man, and creating him anew in the radiant image 
of his Lord. And Peter, standing up to explain the 
new phenomena, rehearses the facts pertaining to the 
death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, and says, 
" He hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear." 
Saul, the hardest of the Pharisees, fell under the same 



478 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

influence. The steel of the Pharisee melted, and 
was moulded in gentler forms, and he tells us that 
when he had open vision of the source of the power 
that subdued him, he found himself ensphered in 
light from the face of Jesus Christ, above the bright- 
ness of the sun. The whole history of the primi- 
tive church only repeats these facts in fulfillment of 
the promise of the Comforter, and in full explana- 
tion of the nature of the promise. The primitive 
church, do we say t We might just as well say the 
whole church for eighteen hundred years. For ever 
and everywhere under the administration of Chris- 
tianity, when the Holy Spirit comes with the most 
of its cleansing, subduing, and transforming power, 
though not with the open vision of Christ, it is with 
the unquenchable consciousness of his presence and 
his insphering light and love ; and where this is 
denied, the power of Christianity wanes, its ordi- 
nances become meaningless, and the Holy Spirit 
pales its ineffectual fires. 

Such self-assertion was never heard of before nor 
since except among men of disordered intellect. Why 
do we read it in the evangelic narratives without 
being shocked with it } Plainly because of its place 
and setting in a biography which is unlike any other, 
and which none of our scales of human grandeur are 
competent to measure ; and the entire harmony and 
proportion are not broken but preserved. But take 
out this egoism and try to fit it into the Hfe of any 






THE WORD MADE FLESH. 



479 



other great man, prophet, apostle, or sage. Isaiah, 
as we have seen, when the vision of God broke upon 
him and the burden of his message was laid upon 
him, did not challenge his adversaries. " Which of 
you convinceth me of sin } " " Ye are from beneath — 
I am from above," but cried aloud from a profounder 
consciousness of mortal infirmity and weakness. 
Nor did John and his fellow apostles when a like 
mission was given them, and the " Woe is me if 
I preach not the gospel " came upon them. They 
resolve themselves into nothingness as fast as pos- 
sible, and are more conscious than ever of an un- 
cleansed selfhood which must not fling its shadow 
across the sunlight of God. If we think this was 
owing to any usages of speech peculiar to the men 
themselves, we have only to take any of our modern 
apostles of truth and try to fit such egoism into the 
frame of their history. 

I do not know of any man whose message to this 
age has been of more deep and solemn import, than 
that of William Ellery Charming. His word, prob- 
ably more than that of any other man, has broken 
the fetters of the body and the mind, and prepared 
the way for a new coming of the Lord. In the de- 
livery of his message he uses very freely the first 
person singular, not in the way of self-assertion, but 
rather to set forth his individual convictions in such 
wise as not to invade the freedom of other minds. 
But if this great prophet of modern freedom had an- 



48o THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

nouRced himself as "the Light of the world/' as 
"come down from heaven/' as the Judge of the earth 
who was to sit on a throne of glory, summon the na- 
tions to his bar and part them to the right hand and to 
the left, to eternal punishment or eternal life ; if when 
his hearers had asked the way to the Father, he had 
said to them — Look upon me, that is the same as 
looking upon God ; if he had promised when dying 
to send them the Holy Spirit, or if he had told his 
followers to put his name into a formula of baptism 
along with that of God and the Holy Ghost to be 
used in proselyting to the end of time, who does not 
see that he would have been answered with a uni- 
versal shout of derision, and that the report of his 
hearers would have been " No man ever spake like 
this man, because no man's ravings were ever half 
so wild ? " Put any other great historic name in the 
same connection and you have the same result : their 
genuine manhood forthwith is sifted out of them and 
the only residuum is human pretense and vanity 
puffed out to their least attenuation. 

If the argument of the foregoing chapters has failed 
to convince any reader that John wrote the fourth 
Gospel, and if there is any lingering suspicion that 
its theories of Christ belong to the second century, 
let him turn to the Apocalypse, the conceded and un- 
doubted production of the beloved disciple. 

We have shown in a preceding chapter that the im- 
agery of the discourses of Jesus as deposited in the 



THE V/ORD MADE FLESH, 48 1 

mind and memory of John, are in the Apocalypse un- 
rolled as the heavenly landscapes, and so representa- 
tive of the angelic life and worship. All that we 
have described as the stupendous egoism of Jesus 
in the fourth Gospel appears in the Apocalypse in 
another form. What Jesus had asserted of himself 
in his discourses, as John reports them, w^hat the 
Golden Proem had claimed for him as the eternal 
Word, appears in the Apocalypse as conceded to him 
by the ascending ranks of the heavenly world. In the 
Apocalypse the metaphysics of the Proem and the dis- 
courses that follow and illustrate it, are seen object- 
ively as concrete forms and personalities. Like the 
diagrams of the mathematicians who put abstract 
reasonings into shapes palpable to sense ; or like the 
chromos of the traveller which translate his words 
into scenery that glows upon the canvas, the Apoc- 
alypse translates the doctrines and theories about 
Christ found in the Gospels and in Paul's epistles 
into the ritual of heaven, heard and seen. " I heard 
behind me a loud voice," says the seer ; and turning 
he saw one like unto the Son of man — Jesus Christ 
in glorified form, who said, " I am the First and the 
Last and he that liveth ; and I was dead and behold 
I am alive forevermore and have the keys of death 
and the underworld." ^ Jesus Christ, in the fourth 
Gospel, is the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin 
of the world. In the Apocalypse the Lamb is coupled 

1 Revelations i. 10, 17, 18. 



482 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

with the name of God as designating the object of 
supreme adoration and love. "The twenty-four 
elders fell down before the Lamb, having each one 
a harp and golden bowl full of incense, which are the 
prayers of the saints. And they sing a new song 
saying, Thou art worthy to take the book and to 
open its seals, for thou wast slain and hast redeemed 
to God by thy blood, men out of every tribe and 
tongue and people and nation, and hast made them 
a kingdom and priests and they reign on the earth. 
And I saw and I heard the voice of many angels 
around the throne and the living creatures and the 
elders, and the number of them was ten thousand 
times ten thousand and thousands of thousands : say- 
ing with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was 
slain, to receive the power and riches and wisdom 
and strength and honor and glory and blessing. 
And every creature which is in heaven and those who 
are on the earth and under the earth and on the sea 
and the things in them, I heard them all saying, To 
Him that sitteth upon the throne and to the Lamb 
be the blessing and the honor and the glory and the 
dominion forever and ever. And the four living 
creatures said Amen, and the elders fell down and 
worshipped."^ 

Not any man however great, or greatly inspired, 
could be thus exalted so as to receive joint honors 
and worship with the Supreme, in any system of 

^ Revelation v. 8-14. 



THE WORD MADE FLESH. 483 

pure theism. Not any angel or archangel could be 
thus exalted ; nay, the higher his exaltation the far- 
ther away would he be from such homage, for the 
lower down and the farthest from sight would be all 
that is himself when ascriptions of glory and domin- 
ion were ascending " to Him that sitteth on the 
throne." And if Christianity has thus exalted a 
mere man, however great and good, if it has thus 
exalted any created being whatever, it is as gross 
a system of idolatry as can be found among any of 
the religions of the earth. 

Is there any other range of fact and statement, 
complementary of that which we have here given, 
whereby a pure monotheism is preserved to us, and 
the Johannean Christology along with it, and made 
bread from heaven for the hunger of the soul } 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE LOGOS DOCTRINE. 

TO void this idolatry from the cultus of Chris- 
tianity, two ways are open to us. One is, to 
apply to the record such destructive criticism as will 
cut out from it all that asserts the essential divinity 
of Jesus Christ. Such criticism assumes that this 
supposed divinity is a factitious halo which has been 
thrown about him from the warm and idolatrous im- 
agination's of his followers. Take all this away, and 
we should find a remarkable preacher and reformer, 
a man developed probably from the best spirit of his 
times, who was born and who died like other men, 
but who like some other men received an apotheosis 
after death. He was divine, says Baur, speaking 
from the stand-point of his Hegelian theosophy, only 
as all human nature is divine ; and the doctrine of 
the incarnation is passed over to the interest of the 
race, serving only as a type of the divine incarnation 
in all humanity, evolving the Christs of every age, 
according to the nature and fullness of its inspiration. 
Try this theory and see how it applies. Begin- 
ning with Matthew and ending with the Apocalypse, 
go through and sift out from the record everything 



THE LOGOS DOCTRINE. 485 

which imports the superhumanity of Jesus Christ. 
Go over those passages which we cited in the last 
chapter, and all the Scripture essentially involved 
with them, including the discourses of Jesus, which 
put forth claims such as no prophet or sage could do ; 
go over these and eliminate them all, and what have 
we left ? We have not a " mere man '' left, nor the 
ghost of a man which can be outlined to any rational 
criticism, however microscopic and keen. The Johan- 
nean writings must be voided almost entire, as the 
German critics very well see. So much of the syn- 
optics as constitute the very frame of their history, 
must be ignored (for example. Matt. i. 8-25, xi. 2jy 
XXV. 31-46, xxviii. 18-20). The Apocalypse must be 
rejected, — a book whose genuineness is past all 
reasonable question, — as a vision which has no 
objective reality answering to it. Whatever is 
merely natural and human in the life of Jesus as 
given in the New Testament, so interblends with the 

I supernatural and superhuman, and makes so com- 
plete a whole, that if you pull away the latter, the 

j former comes with it, or else gives a remainder of 
shreds which belong to no history human or divine. 
For instance, the birth accords with the resurrection 
and ascension ; the incarnation with the excarnation, 

I the ingress into the world with the egress from it. 
These mutually explain each other, and explain the 
miracles as well. Again, the discourses of Jesus con- 
stantly forecast just such a death and coming again. 



486 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

and imply their necessity, and they give tone to his 
divine eloquence and to that inimitable and tender 
pathos that swells through every sentence of his 
later utterances. And those are the very utterances 
which a forger could no more have invented and put 
into his mouth, than Titian could have invented the 
landscapes which he copied upon his canvas. Then 
the history of the Church, and that especially of the 
first two centuries, as already shown, grounds itself 
on just such facts as the New Testament records, 
such a birth, life, death, resurrection, and second 
coming in the Comforter. 

We must seek some other and more rational 
method to clear away this supposed idolatry from the 
cultus of Christianity. We must find it in the key 
of interpretation offered to us freely and constantly 
in its own unmutilated records. The proem taken 
as the grand postulate of Christianity^ and not re- 
solved into mere rhetoric, gives us an open way 
into the heart of the divine revelations, and justi- 
fies the egoism of the fourth Gospel. The Word, 
the Divine Reason itself, which is God in the act 
of utterance, God coming into personal manifesta- 
tion, was incarnate in the Lord Jesus Christ. It was 
not an inspiration merely, it was not a vision of God 
like that of Isaiah or of St. John. It was a more in- 
terior union of natures, the divine within the human. 
By conception and birth the divine was nearer in 
degree to the human, and dawned through the con- 



THE LOGOS DOCTRINE, 487 

sciousness more clearly until Jesus speaks from it 
and acts from it as the normal condition of his own 
being. Then it is not the finite, tempted, suffering 
man who speaks ; it is the Divine Logos itself, God 
revealing himself with no admixture of our mortal 
fallibility and infirmity. Jesus in his full Messiah- 
ship has passed into this consciousness of the divine 
and speaks from it, and the I is no longer the man 
Jesus, but the Word that existed before Abraham 
was, which was always with God, which always was 
God in the act of self-revelation. Even so would the 
Word ever speak of himself as derived from the 
Father, as less than the Father, as begotten of the 
Father, and his only Son. Because the Father is the 
infinite deeps of Divine Being ; in its infinitude un- 
revealed and unrevealable to any finite mind. The 
Word is God so far forth as He is revealed ; forth- 
going from the depths of his infinitude ; eternally 
born of the divine nature, and bringing God into 
personality and into blissful relations with the creat- 
ures He has made. 

Let no one say that this is Sabellianism or Arian- 
ism, or Trinitarianism, if that means the worship of 
three persons. The well-informed reader knows it 
is neither. It is the Logos-doctrine of the primi- 
tive church, found roughly in the synoptics and in 
Paul's fervent metaphysics, but found in the Johan- 
nean writings in a continuous blaze of light, the 
central sun of the whole system of Christian doc- 



488 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

trine whence all its other truths are harmonized. It 
affirms an essential distinction in the divine nature 
of Father and Son ; that these are not merely modes 
of manifestation in time, but were '' in the begin- 
ning," and therefore timeless and eternal. God as 
the Father is the infinite deep of divine being, 
beyond finite apprehension, beyond the reach of 
human thought ; what " no man hath seen or can 
see." But left here we are in blind worship, and 
can only build an altar to the Unknown. Left here 
we should not know God as a self-conscious intel- 
ligence, or as a being who felt the yearnings of an 
unchanging and tender affection. But the Word is 
God speaking, the divine Reason in self-revelation, 
ever on the bosom of the infinite deeps, and bringing 
forth their treasures of truth and love. This is the 
Logos-doctrine. We grope towards it in nature, for 
nature, the more its forces are analyzed, resolves 
itself into one primal force, a supreme intelligence 
with unknown depths beyond. The nature-religions 
groped after it and sometimes saw it in dim twi- 
light. But not till the Word was made flesh, and 
dwelt among us in Jesus Christ, full of grace and 
truth, did this benign personality of God appear in 
its unclouded splendor and break as a new sunrise 
upon the world. 

We see no possibility of missing the doctrine the 
moment we listen to Jesus as his own interpreter. 
When the Jews charge him with making himself 



THE LOGOS DOCTRINE. 489 

God, he meets their accusation by saying, " Believe 
the works, that ye may know and believe that the 
Father is in me and I in him ; '' and to one of his 
own disciples, as if guarding him from a like mis- 
conception of making the Christ a God exterior to 
another or a higher one, he says, " He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father. Believest thou not that 

I AM IN THE FATHER, AND THE FATHER IN ME ? The 

words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself, 
but the Father that dwelleth in me he doeth the 
works." The preexistent sub-deity of Arianism, we 
do not find here. The coeternal second person in 
the Tritheism of the modern church, we find not here 
nor anywhere. Personal preexistence, claimed by 
Jesus, construed as of another person exterior to the 
Father, is a doctrine rigidly excluded by his own 
explanations of his own language. But the church- 
doctrine, ancient and modern, of " the hypostatic 
union," an interior union and inexistence of 
NATURES, we do find such as justifies language on the 
lips of Jesus, which on any other lips, angelic or hu- 
man, would be insufferable, and would be blasphemy 
indeed. And so, in his full Messianic consciousness, 
the Divine Word so possessed his being, that he 
could identify himself with it and say, " I came down 
from heaven, — I am the Word." Or again, the Ab- 
solute Truth was inorbed within him so complete, 
the truth that was to feed the world forever, that he 
could speak as the absolute Truth itself, and say, " I 



490 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

am the bread that came down from heaven/' Tri- 
personality, we do not find. But the three central 
doctrines of Christianity, — the uncomprised Oneness 
of God, the essential divinity of his Christ consub- 
stantial with Him, and the complete humanity of 
Jesus, making all humanity sacred, — we do find in 
their full consistency and harmony.^ 

The Eternal Word, which was in the beginning 
and in which God ever is, was so embodied and imper- 
sonated in the Christ that in his full Messianic con- 
sciousness he calls it himself. As such he came 
forth from the Father, and returned to the Father ; 
as such he comes down from heaven, ascends to 
heaven, and is the Son of Man in heaven ; as such he 
created the world, and judges the world ; as such he 
raises the dead ; as such he was before Abraham* 
and as such he promises, " Lo ! I am with you 
always." This we understand to be the doctrine 
of the Logos which, carried through the Johannean 
writings, and the whole New Testament as well, 
makes a continuous line of light. 

There are two objections to the Logos-doctrine. 
One is metaphysical, the other practical. The first is 
the argumentum ab ignorantia. We cannot under- 
stand how there could be two natures in Christ, the 
divine within the human. What is human is finite ; 
what is divine is infinite, and they cannot be conjoined 
in one person. It is a self contradiction. The an- 
swer is, it may be a mystery ; it is so more or less, 

1 See the Appendix C. 



THE LOGOS DOCTRINE. 



491 



but it is no self-contradiction. And it is just the 
same mystery, which we find in ourselves and in all 
nature, — the union of the infinite with the finite, 
in such wise, that the latter is not abolished and lost, 
but ever remains. The objection sounds strange 
enough on the lips of a philosophy which asserts 
the essential divinity of all humanity ; which has no 
trouble about the deification of every child of Adam, 
and sees no self-contradiction there. How God can 
be in man, how man can be his absolute subject, a 
fresh creation of omnipotence every hour, and yet be 
a self-conscious responsible moral agent, is a mystery 
which has not yet been resolved. How God can be 
in nature, where the infinite is ever becoming finite, 
is a mystery which has never yet been resolved. 
The line where one passes over into the other eludes 
our clumsy analysis. Pantheism denies the fact, 
and resolves the finite in the infinite. Atheism de- 
nies the fact, and resolves the infinite in the finite. 
Herein they rush into mysteries just as inscrutable, 
and make the verdict of the human consciousness 
a lie. In the humanity of Jesus Christ, a humanity 
sinless and complete, there is also the union of the 
infinite and the finite, but a union in such de- 
gree as brings God vastly nearer to ourselves than 
in a human nature depraved and darkened by sin, 
and vastly nearer than in dumb nature around us ; 
a union in which the finite is so turned into living 
transparencies that herein the Word becomes the 



492 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

perfect image and manifestation of the Godhead. In 
the Johannean speech and imagery it is God not 
only in first things but in last things ; not only 
in the centres of infinite being, but in the lowest 
degree of the finite, even to the material clothings 
of our human nature which were lighted up with 
the transfigurations of his glory. God in nature, 
is power, majesty, beneficence ; God in our sinful 
humanity is conscience with trembling apprehen- 
sions of the divine justice. God in Christ is Father- 
hood, justice, mercy, love, tenderness, forgiveness, 
sacrifice, the inmost heart of God lavished on the 
creatures of his hand. It is a revelation which the 
world waited for and needed to be prepared for. It 
unitizes its history and lights up its annals to-day. 
It meets science in its gropings upward at the 
vanishing point of its discoveries, and transfigures 
nature in a light which is above nature, turning it 
into living types of the same spiritual realities which 
revelation had brought into more open view. 

But there is a more practical objection often urged 
against the Logos-doctrine. It takes Christ out of 
our human sympathies and loves. He ceases to 
be our example, our brother whom we may follow 
through like temptations and victories. Make him 
like one of ourselves, a development of our own 
human nature, under like conditions of trial, suffer- 
ing, and help from God, and how encouraging to fol- 
low in his steps ! M^ke hini divine, as no other hu- 



THE LOGOS DOCTRINE. 493 

man being ever was or can be, and how vain must 
all our efforts be to imitate his virtues and put on his 
perfections and graces ! 

We should be very sorry to abate the admiration 
of any one who has been smitten with the loveliness 
of the character of Jesus, seen merely on his human 
side. That it has vastly exalted the ideals of the 
world, as to what constitutes the worth and glory of 
a perfected manhood, and the direction toward which 
we must strive for its attainment, is certainly true. 
That class of the virtues which are hardest to prac- 
tice, and which, in the world's estimate, were scarcely 
reckoned as virtues at all, — forgiveness, meekness, 
love of enemies, love of man as man, complete self- 
consecration in the service of the race, — are mani- 
fest in Jesus Christ, not only as the loftiest ideals, 
but as the most concrete realities, clothed in flesh 
and blood like our own, and as such, flinging per- 
petual rebuke on all our selfish strifes, angers, and 
enmities, and in some degree charming them into si- 
lence and peace. 

But if Christ is our pattern, so is God in pre- 
cisely the same sense, and as He is revealed in the 
Christ himself : '' Be ye perfect, as your Father in 
heaven is perfect." " Be ye followers of God, as dear 
children." Must God, too, be brought down within 
our finite proportions, in order that we may follow 
Him ? Or shall we not gratefully acknowledge, rather, 
that the ideals which shine down upon us from the 



494 '^^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL, 

Divine Perfections, are all the more worthy of our 
aspiration and love because no dimness has come 
over them from our corrupt earthly exhalations ? 
And how true it is, that these ideals never would 
have been furnished us through sheer development, 
and that they come down to us out of heaven, as 
imaged in a humanity in which dwelt the fullness of 
the Godhead bodily ! And if eighteen hundred years 
of culture and progress, with all the added appliances 
of education and philosophy, still leave those ideals 
burning far above us in their solitary splendor and 
beauty, away in the depths of infinite space, Christ 
as a mere example which I am to follow and overtake, 
is no such vast encouragement after all. There it 
shines, — a star in the heavens of royal brightness 
and magnitude, but I cannot reach it. 

If Jesus Christ, as he beams upon me from the 
only biographies which we have of him, taken in the 
whole range of his nature, and the whole height of 
his excellency, is a model which I am expected to 
imitate and translate into my daily life, then he is no 
encouragement to me, but condemnation and blank 
despair. How long must I attain before, standing up 
to challenge the world, I can say, " Which of you 
convinceth me of sin.?" How long before I can tell 
my hearers, " Ye are from beneath ; I am from 
above 1 " How long before I can announce to them, 
'' All that the Father hath is mine," or " No man know- 
eth God but me, and he to whom I shall reveal Him t " 



THE LOGOS DOCTRINE. 495 

At what stage of my moral progress may I become 
so at one -with Almighty God, that I may consider 
myself his purely embodied reason, and speak in my 
own name, and from my own self-consciousness as 
from God himself, and bend his bow and launch his 
thunders ? " The hour is coming when all who are 
in the graves shall hear my voice, and shall come 
forth — they that have done good to a resurrection 
of life, and they that have done evil, to a resurrection 
of condemnation/* Or when from my super-angelic 
acquirements may I announce — "I am the Alpha 
and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first 
and the last, and I hold the keys of hades and death ?" 
To make Jesus Christ my model throughout, would 
not crown me with all human graces and excellences, 
but would place me a fantastic figure on the heights 
of heaven, gesticulating in its lightnings and outlined 
for a moment on its thunderclouds, the next moment 
to disappear in its consuming fires. 

And if this majestic and beautiful life is not to be 
taken as the biographers have made it, if they have 
interjected imaginary facts and discourses, and I must 
carve it and reconstruct it in order to make it sheerly 
human, and bring it so near to my own condition as 
to make it easy for me to copy, what becomes of its 
value to me as an example } I can make it then just 
what I please. I shall leave out what I think unat- 
tainable, very likely the excellences and graces after 
which I ought to strive with prayers and self-denials. 



496 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

and the model of perfection which I shall construct 
will not be an ideal let down to me complete out of 
heaven, but one which I have made out of my own 
preconceptions, and which, in some sort, will be a 
pattern of my own contrivance. Jesus Christ as the 
perfect example, subjected to such a process as this, 
is not the humanity ever shining above us, but con- 
structed after our own notions, and brought near to a 
level with ourselves. 

An example to imitate is not my primary and 
sorest need. I can find plenty of good examples when 
I want them, scattered along the ages, much nearer 
to me and more easy of imitation than the example 
of Jesus Christ. I can find enough of them which 
are not altogether out of my reach, and I should 
doubtless apply myself to copy them, if the main 
business of life consisted in plagiarising the virtues of 
dead men. Indeed I have altogether too many good 
examples already for my peace of mind. They are 
all about me, flinging a lustre across my path at 
every step and rebuking my low attainment. They 
are in my own community, in my own household ; 
examples of royal men and women, the beauty of 
whose daily lives makes us ugly. Thank God for 
these, but our deepest necessities are not in this di- 
rection. Models of behavior for one man, will not 
serve for another ; his environment, his duties, and 
the sweep of his inward life being altogether differ- 
ent. We want God. Our deepest hunger and thirst 



THE LOGOS DOCl'RINE. 497 

reach thitherward. We want Him both within and 
from above. Within He comes to all, but with a vast 
difference as to distinctness and clearness, as the 
shinings of his presence struggle through the chaos 
of our evils and passions. We want Him from above 
also, in the unclouded glory of his attributes, across 
whose serene disk no spots from our own depravity- 
are passing to bewilder and darken our judgment. 
We want Him from above to flood our consciousness 
with light, uncolored by our own passions and false 
conceptions, to make clear our inward beholdings, 
and bring the subjective consciousness into corre- 
spondency with the eternal objective Reality. For 
want of this, what deities have men conceived out of 
their own lusts and fears, and then grovelled before 
them — the reflex image of themselves ! For want 
of this how have men sought out of their own empti- 
ness deities shadowy and unthinkable — the reflex 
image of themselves ! We want God revealed from 
above, not less than from within, that his image 
within, overlaid and darkened with corruption, both 
hereditary and actual, may be cleared and made 
bright. We want God from above, unobscured by 
the guessings of any human theosophies, to melt the 
ice out of us, to warm our frozen affections, and en- 
large them to universal love. And with this the true 
ideals of manhood will come also ; come to every man 
according to the sphere of duty he is to act in, with 
inspirations and impulsions to follow them, and fill 



498 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. \ 

that sphere with a fragrancy and light which are the 
breathings and shinings of the Lord. Then the 
ideals we are to follow will not be some good example 
of sainthood, after the pattern of which we must be 
stretched or trimmed ; they will be given every hour 
to our clarified reason ; the pillar of flame that always 
goes before us, the heavenly vision that always leads 
us on. 

The strictly human virtues of the man Jesus Christ 
are not more valuable to us as examples of a full- 
orbed humanity, than as revelations of the Divine at- 
tributes. Nature reveals God only on the lower and 
outer planes of existence. Man, sinful and unre- 
generate, is at best his distorted and broken image. 
But a humanity perfected under his hand, and in 
which He dwells in fullness, is the complete thought 
of God as to what moral perfection truly is. Whether 
God's justice, mercy, tenderness, forgiveness, com- 
passion and love, are the same in kind with those 
qualities as we find them in the characters of the 
best men, or whether as Mr. Mansel says, they stand 
like algebraic signs for unknown quantities when we 
talk of the awful and infinite One, are questions 
which are painfully oppressive, till the Deity shines 
upon us in the face of Jesus Christ. Herein we 
know that God is not only divine but human as well. 
Because all the virtues of Jesus are human virtues, 
we know that the attributes of God are human at- 
tributes, for the former are the unobstructed creation 



THE LOGOS DOCTRINE, 499 

of the latter and therefore their direct and resplend- 
ent image, and so the open revelation of a Divine 
humanity. Thus the union between God and all his 
human children as they become one in Christ is in- 
timate and full ; they are partakers each of the other s 
nature ; the Divine of the human, and the human of 
the Divine, and the relation is all-sufficing and inde- 
scribably sweet and tender. *' I am the Vine, ye are 
the branches," unfolds all its beautiful significance. 

We want God not alone in our darkened intui- 
tions, but from the cloven heavens. Other religions 
abound in both precept and example. There have 
been good men, thank God, under all forms of faith 
and codes of morals that have anticipated some of 
the divine sayings of the Sermon on the Mount. The 
best men of all nations and ages have seen in some 
degree, at least in their most lucid hours, what they 
ought to do and what they ought to be. Buddhism, 
Parseeism, and Judaism, as the Essenes received it, 
had their lofty ideals of moral perfection, and their 
strivings after it. God has never been without a 
witness, for the Word has ever knocked at the door 
of the human heart, and sought to enlighten every 
man that cometh into the world. But in the Lord 
Jesus Christ the heavens indeed are cloven, and not 
only our ideals of perfection are exalted and purified, 
but God is yielded to us with transforming power to 
cleanse from evil, to energize, to create anew, to 
bring the ideals which He gives more rapidly to their 



500 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

realization, and to glorify himself in a human nature 
redeemed and sanctified. Do you say that after 
eighteen hundred years the work is not yet done, and 
very imperfectly done in Christendom itself? But 
what are eighteen centuries in the cycles of God, for 
bringing such a world as this to such a pitch of 
glory and of experimental knowledge of himself ? It 
was longer than that before the world discovered that 
the nearest fixed star was any thing but a twinkling 
point in the firmament. But Herschell says that 
when he turned his glass in that direction, the star 
changed to a sun and came on like the dawn of the 
morning, and he had to turn away from the beautiful 
sight. What wonder that God, revealed in Jesus 
Christ, should not be seen at once and alike by all ; 
yea, that He only seems far off" like a shimmering 
star ! What mercy is it that this is even so ! and that 
only so far forth as the heart is renewed and the vis- 
ion clarified and enlarged thereby. He comes nearer 
and nearer, till He warms and fertilizes our whole 
being, and fills our whole life with the day-spring. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE JOHANNEAN ATONEMENT. 

^ I ^HE Christian atonement may be contemplated 
-^ from two very different points of view. It is 
a doctrine of philosophy, or it is a doctrine of the 
Christian experience. The former we grasp with 
the understanding only, as we attempt to fathom the 
reasons and methods of the Divine government ; the 
latter we know, as its manifest results are achieved 
and as they glow in the consciousness of the believer. 
As a question of the understanding, it is a matter of 
indefinite controversy, inasmuch as all the reasons of 
the Divine government involve the knowledge of all 
the laws both of the spiritual and the natural world. 
As a question of consciousness it admits of no con- 
troversy, for the atonement of the Christian experi- 
ence is the believer himself brought into harmony 
with the Divine mind, purpose and will, through the 
Mediator ; and it involves a knowledge of the love of 
Christ, and its exceeding and abounding peace. 
This is the atonement as a doctrine of individual 
faith. Stated at large and as the final achievement 
of God in this world, the atonement is the union of 



502 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

God, man, and nature ; so that disharmony between 
man and nature, and between both and God, shall 
cease altogether, and God become all in all ; or in 
Johannean phrase. He shall be not only Iv apKy, in be- 
ginnings, but 6 eo-xaT05, the consummation ; glorified 
m lowest forms of nature and humanity. 

The Pauline writings treat this doctrine as one of 
the understanding. But they do this almost exclu- 
sively, as regards Jews and Jewish converts, and to 
silence objections which come from that quarter, and 
which were temporary and local. When Paul leaves 
them he rises to the heart of the doctrine. But John 
did not write for Jews. Jerusalem had fallen, and 
with it Judaism was passing away, and Christianity, 
as the New Jerusalem, had come in its place. John 
throughout gives the atonement purely as a doctrine 
of the Christian consciousness, and as it came from 
the lips of Jesus in those Sabbatic hours, when his 
disciples were drawn nearest to him, and his heart 
opened out to them its inmost treasures of truth and 
love. How this doctrine of his religion was then 
declared and explicated, becomes a question of su- 
preme interest, for we shall be sure to have its essen- 
tial contents as concerns the salvation of the Christian 
believer. 

In one of his latest discourses, which seems to 
have been uttered in colloquial intercourse with the 
disciples on their way from the last supper to Geth- 
semane, the oneness of the disciple with his Lord, 



THE yOHANNEAN ATONEMENT, 503 

and the means of it, are set forth by imagery of great 
significance and beauty. 

" I am the true Vine and my Father is the husbandman. 
Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away : and 
every branch that beareth fruit he cleanseth, that it may bear 
more fruit. Ye are clean already by reason of the word which 
I have spoken unto you. Abide in me and I will abide in you. 
As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abide in the 
Vine, so neither can ye unless ye abide in me. I am the Vine, 
ye are the branches. He that abideth in me and I in him, the 
same beareth much fruit ; for separated from me ye can do 
nothing. If any one abide not in me, he is cast forth as a 
branch, and is withered ; and men gather it, and cast it into the 
fire, and it is burned. If ye abide in me and my words abide 
in you, ask whatever ye will and it shall be done for you. 
Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit. So 
shall ye be my disciples." 

Neither man nor angel could avow himself an orig- 
inal fountain of life unto others, so as to tell them, 
" Separated from me ye can do nothing ; " or " ye aire 
cast forth as a branch cut from its parent stem, to 
wither and die." Least of all, could any man say 
this on the eve of his death, when the total and final 
separation was to take place. Jesus plainly is speak- 
ing here as the Word ; God revealing himself in all 
his human attributes, so that the behever could lay 
hold of Him by a clear and living faith, and thereby 
the Divine Life flow down through all his nature, 
as the juices of the Vine flow down through the 
branches, till the grapes hang in clusters on the 



504 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

Stems. This is the true oneness with Christ. Sal- 
vation in him is not by an imputed righteousness, 
but by a righteousness imparted and inwrought ; 
manifested in the fruits of righteous Uving ; in the 
clustering charities of a life always replenished and 
flavored from its Divine fountain. It will be seen 
by this that the Johannean theology is the farthest 
possible from any form of Antinomianism, and the 
farthest possible from teaching a dreamy and lazy 
devotion. True, it is profoundly contemplative ; but 
to the end of being more intensely practical, and pro- 
ducing fruit more abundantly, and of more heavenly 
quality ; and any member of the Christian organism 
that is not thus receptive of the Christ, both in faith 
and in practice, is a withered branch to be pruned 
away, cast into the fire and burned. 

How the believer is to abide in Christ and receive 
life from him as the eternal fountain, we learn more 
fully and further on in these last divine colloquies 
with the disciples. The Holy Spirit as Teacher, 
Comforter and Guide, is promised as the gift of 
Christ, as coming through faith in him, and obe- 
dience to his word. The Holy Spirit is the forthgoing 
sphere of the Divine light and love, finding the be- 
liever and infolding him in its celestial airs ; hence 
the Father and the Son — God through his reveaHng 
Word — coming to him and making their abode with 
him. It is the opening down of the Divine Nature 
to transform the human, and take up the burden of 



THE yOHANNEAN ATONEMENT, 505 

its sins and sorrows, and bring man into fellowship 
with God. But this could not be unless man was 
first brought into true fellowship with man. It would 
not have availed to reveal God unless states of recep- 
tion had been wrought in men fitted to receive Him. 
Oneness with the neighbor is a prime condition of 
oneness with the heavenly Father. Man must stand 
right towards his brother, or he never can stand right 
towards his God, and be receptive of Him, and a par- 
taker of his nature. Hence the new code of human 
fellowship which Jesus labored to inaugurate and 
exemplify in his own life on the earth. Every man 
is a part of every other man — this is the sum of the 
new doctrine, and on this was founded the society of 
believers called a church. Until that were done, 
there was no organic form for God's reception and 
indwelling amongst men. Until that were done, men 
individually were - so many repellent forces, every 
man's life antagonizing the life of God. But Jesus 
left eleven disciples, recipients of his word, and the 
first organized form of his kingdom of universal love. 
What followed } The God who had been revealed, 
had now a place to come in. As soon as man was 
put right towards his fellows and towards his God, 
the Divine love and blessing came and swept his soul 
like a lyre. The procession of the Holy Spirit 
followed in the logical sequence of events. God new- 
ly revealed as divinely human, began to flood our 
wasted nature with his life and power, and hence the 



506 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

new dispensation of the Spirit as the inheritance of 
after ages. Bear this in mind, and we shall have a 
full explication of the atonement, or the doctrine of 
man made at one with God in Christ as enunciated 
in the following language : — 

" And now I am coming to thee ; and these things I speak in 
the world, that they may have thy joy complete in themselves. 
I have given them thy word ; and the world hated them, be- 
cause they are not of the world, as I am not of the world. I 
ask not that thou take them out of the world, but that thou keep 
them out of the evil. They are not of the world as I am not of 
the world. Consecrate them in the service of thy truth ; thy 
word is truth. Since thou didst send me into the world, I also 
sent them into the world. And in their behalf I consecrate 
myself, that they also may be consecrated in the service of 
truth. Yet not for these only do I pray, but also for those who 
believe in me through their word ; that they all may be one, as 
thou Father art in me and I in thee, that they may be in us, 
that the world may believe that thou didst send me. And the 
glory which thou hast given me I have given them, that they 
may be one because we are one.i I in them and thou in me, 
that they may be made perfect in one, that the world may know 
that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them as thou hast 
loved me. Father ! as to those whom thou hast given me, I 
desire that they also be with me where I am, that they may 
behold my glory which thou hast given me ; for thou lovedst 
me before the foundation of the world. Righteous Father! 

1 Ka^wy has considerable range of meaning, and is used either in a 
comparative or causal sense ; and when in the latter means accoi'dtng 
as, or because that. So it is used in this same chapter (verse 2), and in 
the passage cited we understand Jesus to be setting forth his one- 
ness with the Father as the ground, or procuring cause of oneness 
with the disciples. 



THE yOHANNEAJV ATONEMENT, 507 

though the world knew thee not, I knew thee, and these knew 
that thou didst send me. And I made known to them thy 
name and will make it known ; that the love wherewith thou 
hast loved me may be in them and I in them." 1 

Such is the Christian atonement, as set forth in the 
divinest language that ever fell upon human ears. It 
is God in Christ, and Christ in the disciple, so far 
forth as he yields himself to Christ, and is brought 
into union with him in obedient and childlike faith. 
The CJiurch in formulating the same doctrine, em- 
phasizes the requirements of the Divine Law, which 
Jesus came to cancel and satisfy, and hence dwells 
primarily, and sometimes too grossly and exclusively 
on his sufferings and death. Let us not ignore or 
undervalue the great truth involved in this formu- 
lation, which even in its grosser apprehension has 
brought to so many minds a sense of the divine for- 
giveness. It is all true that the sufferings and death 
of Christ were necessary to satisfy the requirements 
of the Divine Law. Who can follow on through 
Gethsemane to Calvary, and believe that such a sacri- 
fice is merely to pay the debt of our common mor- 
tality ; that there was not demanded in fundamental 
reasons of the Divine government, " the Lamb slain 
from the foundation of the world } " It is not going 
beyond the letter or the spirit of Scripture to say 
that the death of Christ was an irreversible condition 
of human redemption and salvation. In this sense 
his sufferings and death were vicarious. 

1 John xvii^i3-26. 



508 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

But what do we mean by the laws of God, which 
this great sacrifice was to satisfy ? Not any written 
statutes or parchment regulations, except so far forth 
as these are transcripts of the eternal principles of 
being. The laws of God are the inherent condi- 
tions of the supreme order of the universe, as they 
pervade all worlds and all ranks of existence. That 
order is such arrangement and such subordination of 
lower to higher, of special to general, of evil to good, 
of the less good to the greater, of natural to spiritual, 
as shall insure the highest and widest beneficence. 
If any jot or tittle of these laws of the supreme order 
were to fail, no one can tell the consequent ruin and 
suffering, for the universe is conjoined part to part, 
the whole to each, and each to all, by sympathies and 
relations finer and more pervasive than any analysis 
of ours can show. These laws — not any police reg- 
ulations of Moses — Jesus came not to destroy but 
to fulfill. The sighs of the creation, and the deepest 
undertones of nature, and if we may believe the 
record, the urgencies of the angelic worlds them- 
selves, forecast an epiphany of God in humanity at 
the time it came, and they felt when they could not 
articulate the exigencies of the hour. The benefits 
of that coming, for aught we know, might extend to 
other worlds as well as this. It might have been 
necessary in order to subordinate hell, in order to 
preserve the heavens and keep them clean, not less 
than to redeem the earth, which is the substructure 



THE JOHANNEAN ATONEMENT. 509 

and support of the heavens themselves, that God 
should be in Last things as well as First things, and 
so become all in all The Word become man in 
Jesus Christ. His life on the earth, his death, resur- 
rection, ascension, and coming again in the Paraclete, 
with new regenerating power, were alike the fulfill- 
ment of these laws of the supreme order, through 
which alone God could yield himself to his creation, 
and redeem it and glorify himself in it, while the 
essential principles of our manhood are still pre- 
served. An angel might have descended and pro- 
claimed the abstract truths of the Gospel from the 
tops of the mountains, and then disappeared with 
dissolving views into heaven ; but who does not see 
that the truths, like the lovely vision, would have 
melted away. God must come into this world in such 
wise as to take hold of it and save it, the elements of 
human nature and the laws of action upon it being 
such as we find them ; and this could not be unless 
He made himself a partaker of our nature, drawing 
up into his consciousness by divine sympathies the 
wants and sufferings of ours. 

All this we get gleams of as this great subject of 
the atonement unfolds its mysteries, and we learn it 
in all its relations. Undoubtedly my intellect would 
be gratified if I could see those relations all complete, 
and know the Lamb as " slain from the foundation of 
the world." Here, however, is not where this subject 
touches me savingly and vitally. That is through 



5IO THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

my relations to the Christ, received not as a mere 
man but as God with us, so as to make me a branch 
of the Vine into which the Divine Life perennially 
flows. When I have this I have the daily fulfillment 
of the promise, " Thou Father art in me and I in 
thee, that they may be in us, that the world may 
believe that thou didst send me.'* By this I may be 
brought into such daily communion with God, and 
fellowship of his Spirit, that it shows me what I am 
and what I need ; shows all my sins in contrast with 
his own dazzling purity, helps me to acknowledge 
and repudiate them, and lay their whole burden upon 
Him as his care and no longer mine. Then comes 
the assurance of forgiveness, and the peace of God 
flows in like a river clear and tranquil. For it is one 
of the paradoxes of the Christian experience that the 
more fully our sins are revealed within us, the more 
perfect and well assured is the peace that comes ; and 
when they loom blackest and most sharply defined 
against the clear blue of the heavens beyond them, 
we know that a power mightier than they is working 
in us and taking up our burden for us, that they may 
not trouble us any more. What - multitudes have 
found not only rest but everlasting joy at the feet of 
Jesus Christ, simply by giving themselves away to 
him in an unbounded trust, who never tried to ex- 
cogitate the methods of the atonement, or those eter- 
nal laws of being which it fulfills ! In spiritual things, 
as in natural, the law of demand and supply is sure in 



THE yOHANNEAN A TONEMENT, 5 1 1 

its operations and its last results. What we want 
in Christ we always find in him. When we want 
nothing we find nothing. When we want little we 
find little. When we want much we find much. But 
when we want everything, and get reduced to com- 
plete nakedness and beggary, we find in him God's 
complete treasure-house, out of which come gold and 
jewels and garments to clothe us, wavy in the rich- 
ness and glory of the Lord. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CONVERGING LINES. 

MORE than fifty years of controversy have been 
waged in New England between Trinitarian- 
ism and Unitarianism, as if they were two conflict- 
ing forms of Christianity. In this warfare Trinita- 
rianism has been opposed as if it were both tritheism 
and idolatry ; and Unitarianism has been opposed as 
if it were a denial of Jesus Christ and a rejection of 
his authority. That these mutual charges and im- 
putations are both true and false, could be proved 
abundantly by citations from the writings on both 
sides. Trinitarianism may be held and explicated as 
the worship of three gods, or it may be held as the 
purest theism. We believe it has been held as both. 
Unitarianism may be held as conserving both the 
unity of God and the divinity of Christ, or it may 
merge both these doctrines in sheer pantheism, and 
lose the historical Christ altogether. It has had all 
this range, and has it to-day. 

At the same time Christianity, as God's all-re- 
vealing Word and his final achievement in human 
nature, has a unitizing power more manifest from 
age to age. The Paraclete which it promised and 



CONVERGING LINES, 513 

which it ever brings, ought to melt down artificial 
distinctions, and develop amid all this diversity an 
increasing and controlling Catholicity. Christianity 
was given to mankind in a state not much removed 
from barbarism ; and to say that clouds gathered 
about it, drawn from human conceit and earthliness, 
is only saying that it did not turn the earth by magic 
into Paradise. At the same time we should expect 
the obscuring clouds to grow lighter, and finally dis- 
solve. And so they do. Two great facts are note- 
worthy. Jesus Christ, as given in the New Testa- 
ment, and in the consciousness of the Church, ever 
growing deeper and clearer, is the guide of the na- 
tions to-day. The statistics show it. The denomi- 
nations which receive Christ, not as the self-develop- 
ment of human nature, eighteen hundred years ago, 
but as the opening down of God to man, and of 
heaven to earth, at this hour, are spreading and grow- 
ing, and their ratio of increase is higher than that of 
the population. Faith in Christ, as the great want of 
man and the renewing power of a fallen world, waxes 
but never wanes. This is one fact, we say, which the 
statistics of the denominations carefuly collated clearly 
reveal. And there is another, which may not be 
within the reach of statistics, but concerning which 
we presume the reader will have no shadow of 
doubt. It is this : — the denominations are becom- 
ing more fully possessed with the mind and spirit of 
Christ. If you doubt it compare the present century 



514 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

with the last, or compare the modern with the medi- 
aeval ages as pertains to the golden fruits of a true 
faith, righteousness, charity, brotherhood, and uni- 
versal love. The beatitudes of the Sermon on the 
Mount, the humanities of the sermon on Mount Oli- 
vet, and the love that breathes through the Johan- 
nean discourses, never beat with more tender pulses 
than now, to move and inspire all the ecclesiasti- 
cisms of the Christian world. Worthier and love- 
lier views of the divine character and attributes ; zeal 
for Christ purged of all bitterness from the gall of 
the unregenerate heart ; tolerance of error in opinion ; 
intolerance of wrong to any child of God, or of cru- 
elty to any creature He has made ; better theories of 
human nature and destiny ; and better feelings of 
human fellowship that make every man, not only the 
image of God but the image of every other man, — 
these mark the advent of Christ, as John foresaw it, 
— Christianity displacing at length the old Judaism 
and heathenism, as the New Jerusalem coming down 
from God out of heaven. The unbelievers who assail 
Christianity now must go back into the centuries, 
where they find it as corrupted and overlaid by the 
Judaism or Paganism, through which it was melt- 
ing its way, not as it breaks through them from the 
face of the Christ himself. True, it is not yet en- 
tirely cleared of them, for they are '' the old man with 
his lusts " that lurks in all our hearts, but the mis- 
sions, the charities, the self-sacrifice, the faith in God, 



CONVERGING LINES, 515 

the hope of man, and the deeper tenderness that 
beats through them all, are the inspiration of the 
Christ always coming in his kingdom. If you doubt 
this, strike out that name and the faiths organically 
connected with it ; faiths which make man an immor- 
tal being, to be cared for as such, and not an animal, 
to be fed and dressed for this world only ; faiths which 
give the Paraclete as the inspiration of our work-day 
songs and our visions of heaven at the dying hour, 
— strike these out and leave every man to his own 
guessings and intuitions, and how speedily would our 
beneficent Christian enterprises collapse and die ! 
The living Christ, we say, leads and inspires the 
thought of all our advancement to-day. Any reform 
that meets with tolerable success, succeeds, because 
the Christ is in it, showing the worth of man as an 
immortal being, the child of a universal Father and 
the member of a universal brotherhood, his fellow- 
ship being not of earth and time only, but of the 
glorified in heaven as well, whose sympathies draw 
us mightily upward, and whose " Come up hither ! " 
ever falls down to cheer us. There is not a denomi- 
nation of Christendom, whose literature we are ac- 
quainted with, which does not show that the Spirit is 
coming within them with greater fullness and tender- 
ness, making their theologies fluid in the love of 
Christ, as they reflect from his face in softer Hght 
the Beatitucjes which he spake and lived. 

All this being so, another consequence ineyitably 



5l6 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

follows. We cannot move towards the Christ with- 
out coming closer to each other. Leave out him and 
his unitizing Word, and let every man strike out for 
himself, and we tend to a crumbling individualism, to 
endless distraction and • confusion. But those who 
acknowledge Jesus ChristL as the supreme authority 
and guide, and enter more into his all-revealing mind, 
are making progress towards the harmonizing truths 
which he represents. However wide apart they may 
be at the start, their progress is ever on converging 
lines. Essential truth becomes more and more central 
and manifest, the non-essential falls away to its sub- 
ordinate place, and orthodox and unorthodox move 
alike towards a higher and higher unity. It is not 
that any one sect is making a conquest of the others, 
but Jesus Christ is making a conquest of us all. 

Some time ago Professor Stuart declared in the 
name of Trinitarian orthodoxy, that it did not teach 
three persons in the Godhead, in the sense in which 
Unitarians interpret that phraseology ; that Trini- 
tarians did not use the word person in its modern 
acceptation, but to indicate a distinction in the 
Divine Nature, which they did not pretend to under- 
stand, and that the word '' person " was only employed 
on account of the poverty of language. And because 
of this liability to misconstruction, the word has been 
dropped from many declarations of faith. Several 
orthodox creeds are before us, some of them of large 
representative churches, which read, " We believe in 



CONVERGING LINES, 



517 



one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," leaving the 
interpretation of these Bible words to the Christian 
believer, as God shall reveal himself in the clarified 
consciousness, so that the divine threeness shall not 
conflict with the divine unity. 

That the worship of Christ may be and often is 
idolatrous worship ; that it is the exaltation of the 
creature to the place of the Creator, of a finite suffer- 
ing man to the place of God, we are by no means 
disposed to deny. We suppose it inevitable that 
many minds cling to the mere finite without rising 
clearly out of it. But we have no right to bring this 
as a sweeping charge against the orthodox denomina- 
tions, as many persons do. Those who make these 
charges ignore the distinction which orthodoxy has 
always made in its doctrine of ^' the hypostatic union," 
the more interior union in Christ of the infinite and 
the finite. Christ as an object of prayer and of 
divine honors, stands for nothing finite and mortal to 
the mind of any intelligent worshipper, but rather for 
the Divine Logos, of which the finite suffering hu- 
manity was but symbol and scaffolding. To bring 
down the Christ within our human dimensions, and 
then project our shriveled conception into the creeds 
of our neighbors, and charge them with worshipping 
the Christ as we have constructed him, is not the 
device of truthful and honorable controversy. As the 
Mediator through whom alone the soul has been 
drawn up into the embrace of the divine love, what 



5l8 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

rnultitudes there are, both Trinitarian and Unitarian, 
who would say with tearful thanksgivings, " All I 
know of God is bound up in that name/' 

There is no ground for the charge of idolatry 
against those w^ho worship God under the name of 
Christ, from that fact alone, any more than there is 
against the Naturalist, who sees God through the 
symbols of nature. The Naturalist, if a theist, sees in 
Nature God revealing himself, and he stands amid 
her blaze of magnificence, and adores. Am I to turn 
upon him, and charge him with Fetishism, with wor- 
shipping stones, and trees, and mountains, and not 
rather enter into his thought, in which stones, trees, 
and mountains, and the whole range of finite objects, 
are seen as the exponents of forces that lie within 
them and behind them, and these again resolved into 
the ground-force of all which is the adorable and 
eternal One. No catalogue of finite objects, however 
classified, exhausts your conception of Nature. It 
implies some power that lies within and behind them. 
If you ascribe to this power self-consciousness and 
personality, you are a theist and worship this power 
as God. But I should grossly belie your thought if 
I charged* you with making deities of finite objects, 
whether stones and trees, or suns and stars, or 
men and women. Just as grossly do you misrepre- 
sent the Christian theist, when you charge him with 
worshipping a creature when he worships God in 
Christ. He forewarns you that while he sees Jesus 



CONVERGING LINES. 



S19 



the perfected man, finite, suffering, dying, he sees 
also the Eternal Word, that same Power which you 
see in nature. He sees it as he believes no longer 
dimly, but clothed in all the attributes of Divine 
Fatherhood, and of our own humanity in infinite de- 
gree ; coming into the world through a more perfect 
and open way than that of nature, in order to take 
man*s spiritual burdens upon himself, purify his child, 
and raise him up to the Divine communion. This is 
what he worships in Christ. He no more worships 
a finite and suffering man when he worships God in 
Christ, than you worship stones, trees, and moun- 
tains when you worship God in nature. But in a 
man though finite and suffering, yet unstained by sin, 
in a humanity not partial and one-sided but in com- 
plete and majestic proportions, and in which the Eter- 
nal Word is become man, he thinks he has access 
to the Godhead in his warm glories, and his forgiv- 
ing and cleansing love, such as you can never have 
through material nature, nor yet in a humanity foul 
with the stains of moral corruption. 

Between Unitarianism as Channing held it, and 
Trinitarianism, as Stuart held it, plainly the contro- 
versy ought to cease, as regards this single doctrine 
of the Divine Unity. In other respects, in details of 
doctrine, doubtless, the two systems greatly differ ; 
but both tend to a sublimer unity in the Christ where 
artificial distinctions have fallen down. Channing's 
prime objection to creeds was that they come between 



520 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

the disciple and his Lord, and so are a hindrance to 
progress. He beheved that Christianity as yet had 
been but half apprehended ; that orthodox and het- 
erodox ahke were in the beggarly elements, and 
that their true progress lay not away from Christ, but 
towards Him. He seems to have worshipped God 
in Christ, at least, in his latest meditations, as much 
as any orthodox monotheist could consistently do, for 
in his last public utterance, which has been called the 
Swan-song of a Son of Light, he shows clearly that 
he had faith in what orthodoxy calls the " hypostatic 
union," though he believed it a doctrine too vast 
and mysterious to be packed into our human for- 
mulas. 

" All the doctrines of Christianity," he says, " are 
more and more seen to be bonds of close, spiritual, 
reverential union between man and man ; and this is 
the most cheering view of our time. Christianity is 
a revelation of the infinite, universal, paternal love of 
God towards his human family, comprehending the 
most sinful, descending to the most fallen, and its 
aim is to breathe the same love into its disciples. It 
shows us Christ tasting death for every man, and it 
summons us to take his cross, or to participate of his 
sufferings in the same cause. Its doctrine of im- 
mortality gives infinite worth to every human being, 
for every one is destined to this endless life. The 
doctrine of the * Word made flesh ' shows us God 
uniting Himself most intimately with our nature^ 



CONVERGING LINES. 52 1 

manifesting himself in a human form, for the very 
end of making us partakers of his own perfec- 
tion." 1 

When the denominations have done with the hu- 
man creeds, and trust alike to the Word made flesh, 
they will meet together not by any compromise of 
opinions but in due course of Christian progress ; 
not on any field of past controversy, but on those 
higher planes of thought where the beams of truth, 
once refracted and separated, are gathered and re- 
united into one ray of white light which reflects the 
sun in his original brightness. Theologians are evan- 
escent and soon pass away. But the Word of God 
remains. A church founded upon it, such as Chan- 
ning dreamed of and prayed for, fettered by no hu- 
man interpretations but gathered only around him, in 
whom, to quote Channing's words, " the fullness of 
Divinity dwells,'' has all the future for its inheritance 
with none of the effete dogmas of the past ; it may 
grow forever into the more perfect form and body of 
Christ till he lives in all its functions ; its differences 
will be only as surface waves, while its unity of spirit 
will be as the deep, still currents beneath. 

Experience thus far has shown that all attempts 
at progress by leaving out the Christ, have resulted 

1 This is from Dr. Channing's address at Lenox, his last public 
utterance. But it must not be inferred from this emphatic language, 
that he had adopted any received theory of the nature of Christ. We 
gather elsewhere from his writings that he considered himself a 
learner to the last. 



522 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

in retrogression, not in a new unfolding of the wealth 
of the Gospel ; that all movement out of the circle 
and beyond the influence of the personalities of the 
Bible, is not into the light that burns warmer and 
clearer. No foothold, that we can see, has ever been 
found, but one exceedingly slippery, between the nat- 
uralism that makes Christ a normal development of 
our nature, and the supernaturalism that asserts his 
essential Divinity. If we deny the latter, the whole 
New Testament must be reconstructed and vast 
portions of it expunged, and tj;ie Tiibingen critics are 
right. Their method is the true one, and it depends 
on individual taste and idiosyncrasy, how much shall 
be expunged and how much shall be left, and whether 
anything. Not only so, but Christian history for 
eighteen hundred years has been developed from 
shadows, and the glorified company of saints have 
fed on husks that had no corn within them. 

But why not teach the great truths of universal 
religion, God and the Holy Spirit and immortality 
and the duties of love to God and love to man with- 
out any other authority than the truths themselves } 
Because these words, — God, the Holy Spirit, and 
Immortality, — within the circle of Christian ideas 
and personalities are fraught with a meaning which 
they can never lose, but which grows more full and 
sufficing with all Christian progress ; whereas outside 
that circle the meaning leaks out of them all the while, 
till they hang empty and float in air. No one who 



CONVERGING LINES. 



523 



I 



receives the Christ of the New Testament history, 
can lose faith in the personal fatherhood of God, 
in his universal providence, in the Holy Spirit as an 
effusive energy coming from above man to find him 
and renew him, in the existence of an angel-world, 
and in man as created for its abodes. Not only so, 
but these truths grow upon him and become the ever 
brightening scenery of his mind. On the other hand, 
outside the circle of Christian ideas and personal- 
ities, they freeze into abstractions, or fade off alto- 
gether, till God sinks into an impersonal force, and 
the spirit-world is swamped in the natural. If the 
idea of God, as held by such men as Herbert Spen- 
cer, and by men of equal ability nearer home, gets 
the essential qualities of a Divine Fatherhood strained 
out of it, leaving only an unknowable force for the 
evolution of phenomena, what reason have we to 
suppose that churches, founded not on Jesus Christ 
but on individual intuitions, may not exist with all the 
forms and titles of Christian theism, while all Chris- 
tian thought is leaking out of its words and rituals ? 
There are *' liberal Christians '* among all sects ; 
those, that is, who believe that Christianity is not yet 
learned out, that it is to have an auspicious future, 
since the hard features of the old creeds are softening 
and the old Unes of division grow indistinct. These 
changes, as we read the signs, come not mainly from 
our controversies, nor from any visible appliances 
whatsoever. They come from the profounder cur- 



524 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

rents of the Spirit within, which is bearing all of us, 
Trinitarians and Unitarians alike, towards higher 
realms of truth, and towards a more comprehending 
unity. This current sets not away from Jesus Christ 
and his Word, but toward larger views of both. The 
yearnings of this age, as we interpret them and as 
uttered out of the deepest wants of human nature, 
reach in this direction. 

In America, the great denominations that move 
on with renewed vigor to the work of Christian civ- 
ilization and education, do not make their theologies 
less Christian but more so, and the Christ in them 
gives to them both their aggressive power and their 
inspiring song. The antichristian Rationalism has 
not shown itself the advanced thought of the times, 
but the very smallest among the reflex eddies under 
the lee shore, while the vast current of the world's 
progress is sweeping grandly by. We can be set 
back on one of these side-eddies if we will, and 
then the other Christian bodies, advancing with the 
ideas which we shall have abandoned, will do the 
work which we ought to have done, — or as we pray 
and believe will be the case, we can be true to our 
historic urgencies and pledges, and then it is plain to 
see there is a point not far off in the distance, where 
we shall see the triumph of the divinest of all Unita- 
rianism : " I in them and thou in me that they may be 
made perfect in one, and that the world may believe 
that thou hast sent me." 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE THRONES IN HEAVEN. CONCLUSION. 

" T SAW thrones," says the seer of the Apocalypse 
J- when describing the ritual of heaven. They 
appear in gradation rank above rank ; and three grades 
are distinguished. There is the throne of the Su- 
preme, who sits thereon encircled with rainbows, and 
the worshippers rest not day and night, saying. Holy, 
holy, holy Lord God Almighty, which was and is and 
is to come." There is the throne of the Lamb, who 
receives homage almost as great, who draws around 
him the alleluiahs of every creature which is in heaven 
and on the earth and in the under world and in the 
sea, whose name is coupled with that of God in re- 
ceiving adoration ; who sitteth down on the throne 
of God, or who is " in the midst of the throne ; " so 
that the same throne is called " the throne of God 
and the Lamb." The same divine predicates are ap- 
plied to him as to the Almighty, " Alpha and Omega, 
the Beginning and Ultimation, the First and the 
Last," and he feeds the saints from the midst of the 
throne, and judges the sinners who hide under rocks 
from " the wrath of the Lamb." There is a third 
and lower rank of thrones : those of the twenty-four 



526 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

elders, thrones of judgment for the redeemed who 
are to reign with Christ ; and the promise is given 
that as Christ sits down with the Father on God's 
throne, so the saints shall sit down with Christ on 
his throne. 

The reader knows very well what the literalists 
make of all this. It is the worship of a created being, 
so great and so exalted, that he sits on the throne 
of the Almighty, and receives a worship such as no 
enlightened pagan ever gave to inferior divinities. 
But it is not supreme worship, they say, but analo- 
gous to the homage paid to sovereigns and magis- 
trates, only more magnificent, as to one more wor- 
thy ; for does he not promise the same in kind to his 
saints who are to sit with him on thrones of judgment 1 

And what is the judgment-seat of Christ to which 
his saints are invited } Turn to Matthew, twenty- 
fifth chapter, and we shall see. The Son of Man 
comes in glory to summon all peoples to his bar, 
sits on the throne of his glory, and separates the 
saints from the sinners, — those to eternal life and 
these to eternal punishment. A singular judicial 
process, if the saints themselves are on the throne of 
judgment and not at the judgment bar ! 

This imagery of the Apocalypse only puts into 
concrete and objective form the figurative language 
of Christ in the Gospels. When events were moving 
on to their crisis, Peter came to Jesus with the ques- 
tion, " Behold, we have forsaken all and followed 



THE THRONES IN HE A VEN — CONCL USION. 52/ 

th-ee, what shall we have therefore ? " Jesus assures his 
Apostles in reply : " When the Son of Man shall sit in 
the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve 
thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel." The am- 
bition of two of them took fire at the prospect. They 
wanted the highest thrones, one on the right and one 
on the left of Christ ; and soon after this they came 
with their mother secretly and applied for such pro- 
motion. What was the answer of Jesus } One of 
the most solemn rebukes of human ambition which it 
ever received, and one of the most touching lessons 
of humility and self-sacrifice: "Whoever will be 
chief among you let him be your servant. Even as 
the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but 
to minister." Has Jesus left these lessons behind, and 
gone into the heavens, thence to address a more po- 
tent stimulus to our mean selfishness or our pom- 
pous vanities, than the empty grandeurs of earth 
could ever give 1 

When we undertake to interpret a symbolical book, 
we should not mix up symbol and letter into a jumble. 
We have seen into what a slough of insane nonsense 
the Apocalypse may thus be turned. But keep con- 
stantly to its symbolic meaning, and though we may 
not be drawn up to its sublime heights of vision, 
we shall have the same serene and blissful openings, 
that are given us in the fourth Gospel. 

Persons in the Apocalypse, and the imagery amid 
which they appear, very often symbolize truths in a 



528 THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

connected series ; even Christianity, as a system of 
truth, in its power of judging, regenerating, and 
saving mankind. What are the apostohc thrones ? 
Seats raised aloft with the fishermen of Gahlee robed 
royally and sitting thereon, as the judges of their 
fellow men, they to whom the injunction first 
came, — Judge not that ye be not judged ? Not 
at all ; but the apostolic truths which they repre- 
sented, applied in their royal power to subdue and 
save, and beneath which those twelve men have 
learned by this time to bring themselves in lowly 
self-surrender. And what is the worship of " God 
and the Lamb } " Is it the worship of a created, de- 
pendent being, receiving the alleluiahs of the uni- 
verse while seated on the throne of God 'i Is this the 
worship received by a man who came to teach humil- 
ity, and whose last office on earth was washing his 
disciples' feet 1 Is it the kind of worship we render 
to sovereigns, magistrates, and prophets } How John 
himself was taught to regard such worship, rendered 
not alone to magistrates and prophets, but to an angel 
of heaven of large commission, he has told us, for 
when he fell down to worship at the feet of the angel, 
though not rendering supreme worship, — for there is 
no intimation that he mistook the angel for the Al- 
mighty, — he was promptly rebuked, '' See thou do it 
not, for I am thy fellow servant and of thy brethren 
the prophets, — Worship God!' 

I can worship neither sovereign nor prophet, nor 
archangel nor any created being whatever, placed on 



THE THRONES IN HE A VEN — CONCL US ION, 5 29 

the throne of God and " in the midst of the throne," 
and my conviction is still the same, that if Christi- 
anity demands this of me it is as gross a system of 
idolatry as can be found among the religions of the 
earth. The Greeks who worshipped Apollo under 
Zeus did not place their sub-deity so high as this ; 
did not make him the Alpha and Omega, the Begin- 
ning and the Ending, the First and the Last. No ; I 
believe all this worship is rendered to the Logos of 
God who appeared as the Son of Man ; to God speak- 
ing, or humanized to our finite conceptions and our 
deepest spiritual needs. It is the Word which was 
in the beginning with God, which is God in self-reve- 
lation, which is ever on the throne of judgment, and 
which by his unerring truth will judge the world at 
the last day ; and who moreover ever brings forth to 
us the wealth of the Divine Nature, and its deepest 
and tenderest love. Does any enlightened person 
need to have it proved to him, that " the Lamb as it 
had been slain," appearing in the midst of the throne 
of God, and thence feeding those who hunger, and 
leading those who thirst by living waters, is neither a 
lamb literally, nor a man who had been put to death ; 
but the Divine Logos rather, revealing the Eternal 
Father as Sacrifice, Mercy, and Love ; love so tender 
that like our human love it can be wounded, can bleed 
for us, can give itself away for our redemption, yea, 
can be crucified or killed out from the impenitent soul ; 
love of which the sacrifice on Calvary is only an out- 
34 



S30 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

ward sign, but the best, the truest, and the tenderest 
which our earthly annals can afford ? We talk of 
the Fatherhood of God, and make it a cold and sound- 
ing generality, while God is far off in the unknown ; 
and we might add mother and nurse or any other words 
of endearment from our human relations, without com- 
ing anywhere near to that experience of the divine 
love which the disciple finds in Christ as the Lamb 
of God who taketh away the sin of the world ; which 
made Faber exclaim in excess of emotion, — 

" I thrill with painful joy, to find 
God's fatherhood so nigh." 

I can see no reason why those Unitarians who 
receive the Gospel message in its integrity should 
forego the power, the inspiration, the renewing grace 
which the Logos doctrine has ever had among the 
followers of Christ, As held by the early Church it 
does not impinge in the least on the prime doctrine 
of Unitarian theology, — the essential oneness of the 
Divine Nature.^ It has commended Orthodoxy to 
myriads of hearts and minds which draw this from 
it as its central and vital power ; and I doubt not 
multitudes who are not called orthodox are in tacit 
acknowledgment of the same truth, but who would 
shrink from any fixed formulation of it, because hu- 
man symbols are too poor for it. Between orthodox 
and unorthodox alike, it would be a bond of vital 
fellowship, giving them beneath all other forms and 

1 See the Appendix D. 



THE THRONES IN HE A VEN — CONCL USION. 5 3 I 

theologies, however diverse, a common experience of a 
Saviour s deepest and tenderest love. It would, as we 
believe, invest every communion table with the almost 
visible presence of a Divine Redeemer and with the 
very fragrancy of heaven, for its worship would blend 
joyously with the worship around " the throne of God 
and the Lamb," and the church on earth and the 
church above would join in the music of one corona- 
tion song, — " Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to 
receive power and riches, and wisdom and strength, 
and honor and glory and blessing." For only when 
we can see " the Lamb in the midst of the throne," 
have we come into the heart of the Divine Mercy, 
where the throne is no longer invested with the thun- 
derings and lightnings of Sinai, but clothed in rain- 
bows in token that the storms are over. 

The Divine Incarnation in the Lord Jesus Christ, 
we conclude to be the distinguishing doctrine of 
the Johannean theology. The other New Testament 
writers forecast it or reach towards it, and sometimes 
grasp it, but it beams forth in John as the sun of the 
whole Christian system, showing all its other truths in 
organic relations with it. Shall we not say too that 
all the other great religions prophesy towards it and 
find in it their fulfillment } Could Judaism have 
found its consummation in anything short of such a 
Divine Epiphany, revealing God not only as the Be- 
ginning but the End and Ultimation } What but this 



532 THE FOURTH GOSPEL, 

was to bridge the awful chasm between the world 
and Jehovah : He dwelling apart in his lonely soli- 
tudes, imposing law on his subjects and enforcing it 
with his thunders ? Could a mere prophet, coming 
only in the line of the old ones, and saying their mes- 
sage over again, have given any culmination to the 
Jewish history ? What would he have been but an 
earlier Mahomet with his endless iteration of " God 
is God," but with this other truth, God is human, still 
withheld, instead of being given to the heart to soften 
its savagery and melt it down in the Divine Love ? 
What but this truth was Judaism, as we find it rep- 
resented in Philo reaching after and trying to clasp 
with its finest tendrils where Philo makes out two 
Jehovahs, and is feeling after the Logos as the Son 
of God and the angel of his nearer presence ? 

The two other great religions of the world, the 
religions of the Orient, have spent their force and 
have no future. Brahmanism is all centre. God is 
everything, and man and nature nothing, and belong 
to the world of illusion. God is the Alpha but never 
the Omega. Buddhism is all circumference. It af- 
firms nature and humanity, but God is lost from both. 
Its Nirvana, though it promises eternal rest as the 
reward of self-renunciation, still leaves a vast lacuna 
as pertains to a spiritual world. Its morality, so near 
that of Christianity as to anticipate its entire moral 
code abuts upon nothing to give it support and inspi- 
ration ; and as pertains to the truths that inlay the 



THE THRONES IN HE A VEN — CONCL US ION 533 

Christian revelation, it is only the deep-drawn pensive 
sigh of human nature, towards the Word made flesh ; 
toward the Christ emerging out of the painful void, 
and lighting up both the spiritual world and the natural 
with the glories of the Godhead. Buddha only saw 
nature as a burden upon the spirit, to be denied and 
repudiated ; he never saw nature and spirit in harmo- 
ny, one to be glorified by the other ; the natui;al, the 
clothing of the spiritual, and God pervading them 
both and making them sweet and sacred, by his trans- 
figurations. Hence Buddhism was only a prophecy 
and preparation for that coming which should give 
it centre as well as circumference, and fill its painful 
chasm with divine reality. Its morality, sweet and 
pure as it is, has nothing behind it, and so lacks 
any impletion from the Divine Energy ; and though 
numbering nearly one third of the human race among 
its votaries, it has never organized any form of society 
which is really progressive. As applied to the wounds 
and sufferings of human nature, it is not a healer 
but a narcotic, to drown for the time being the con- 
sciousness of pain. " In the plan of the world's 
order," says Bunsen, " it seems even now producing 
the effect of a mild dose of opium on the raving or 
despairing tribes of weary-hearted Asia. The sleep 
lasts long, but it is a gentle one, and who knows how 
near may be the dawn of the resurrection morning 1 " 
And if the Divine Incarnation, which reveals God 
not only as the Beginning but the Ultimation, is a 



534 '^^^ FOURTH GOSPEL. 

truth towards which all the old religions prophesy out 
of the deepest wants of human nature, so again the 
modern religions which lead the world's progress, date 
from it and draw from it their impletion of life and en- 
ergy. It is the focal centre of the world's history and 
unitizes the whole. Yea more ; Origen is not only 
grandly comprehensive but strictly Johannean, when 
he mal<,es Christ as the Logos the mediating and aton- 
ing power of the whole universe, angelic as well as hu- 
man. Everything beyond the sphere of the Divine 
Existence is separated from God, and impure in his 
sight, and so Christ, the Eternal Word, is ever mediat- 
ing to bring the universe into harmony with Him and 
fill it with Himself. This atoning work, says Origen, 
goes on in the heavens and upon the earth, and the 
cross is only its outermost earthly sign.^ The Word 
becoming flesh puts him as never before in fellowship 
and correspondency with all mankind, and his atoning 
work in this world was not accomplished by a sacrifice 
made once for all, but is ever widening and will keep 
on till it fills the whole orb of humanity. In more 
inspired language than Origen's, John describes the 
one event in the world's history, which was to fulfill 

^ Kai 7^p &TOWOP, virep avOpcairivcoj/ fihv avrhv (f>d(rK€LU afiapTrjjjLoiTCiDU 
yeyevaduL BavdroVy ovk ert Se vwep ^Wov riuhs Trapa rhu 6.v0p(aiTov iu 
a}xapr^fxa(TL yey evrifievov, olov virep ^.a-Tpccv, ovds rtau ^CTpcov Traurhs 
Kadapcoy ourcav ii/(ainov rod Oeov, q)S iv T(p 'lu)$ ayeypajtiev (25, 5>) ^* M-^ 
6.pa virep^oAiKas rovro eXprirai. — Com. in yoh. 

The passage is quoted by Baur, Versohnung^ p. 65 ; and absurdly 
criticized, pp. 66, 67. 



THE THRONES IN HE A VEN. — CONCL USION 535 

its prophet yearnings and assuage and finally banish 
its woes : " Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, 
and He will dwell with them, and they shall be his 
people, and God himself shall be with them, and be 
their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from 
their eyes ; and there shall be no more death, neither 
sorrow nor crying ; neither shall there be any more 
pain ; for the former things are passed away." 



APPENDIX, 



THE EASTER CONTROVERSY. 

IT becomes necessary here to notice an alleged dis- 
crepancy between the fourth Gospel and the synop- 
tics, touching the time of the last supper and the cruci- 
fixion of Christ. The synoptics — such is the objection 
— make the last supper fall on the 14th of the Jewish 
month Nisan, or on Thursday evening of Passover week, 
and the crucifixion on the isth, or Friday ; whereas the 
fourth Gospel makes no mention of the pascal supper at 
all, but describes an ordinary meal on the evening of the 
13th, and makes the crucifixion fall on the 14th, the day 
following. That is to say, the fourth Gospel describes a 
supper on the evening of what we call Wednesday, which, 
therefore, was not the Passover, and places the crucifixion 
on Thursday, in entire inconsistency wdth the first three 
Gospels. 

This supposed discrepancy would be of less conse- 
quence, even if it had turned out a real one, had not a 
controversy in the second century brought it to bear fa- 
tally, as some think, against the genuineness of the fourth 
Gospel. The controversy was this : The churches of 



538 APPENDIX, 

Asia Minor held an annual festival on the 14th Nisan, 
established, as Baur holds, in commemoration of the last 
supper, — the Passover meal of Jesus with his disciples. 
At Rome, on the other hand, the festival was held on 
Friday of paschal week, without any reference to the day 
of the month on which it might fall, and the churches of 
Asia Minor were blamed because they would not con- 
form to the Roman custom. A w^arm controversy arose. 
The churches of Asia Minor appealed in behalf of their 
observance to apostolic tradition, and especially to the 
authority of jFohn himself then freshly preserved among 
them. Therefore, — such is the argument, — they could 
not have regarded the fourth Gospel as written by John, 
since its authority is directly against them. The fourth 
Gospel, say the critics, makes Jesus eat for the last time 
with his disciples, ^' before the feast of the Passover '^ 
(chap. xiii. i), and describes him crucified on the next 
day, before the time of the Passover meal. It is palpable 
evidence that, on the very scene of John's labors, and 
near to his times, and among his own followers and 
churches, our fourth Gospel was not known, or if known, 
was not named as genuine. 

We have stated the objection succinctly ; but the rea- 
sonings which have grown out of it, the arguments and 
the answers, would make a small library. It has em- 
ployed the time of such writers as Baur, Neander, Bleek, 
De Wette, Schneider, and Tholiick, in Germany; of the 
best English theological writers ; and Mackay, in a late 
treatise assailing the genuineness of the works of the New 
Testament, and the fourth Gospel in particular, fills page 
after page wath this controversy, and closes in a tone of 



APPENDIX, 



539 



exultation that here is an argument which, if all others fail, 
puts the spuriousness of the fourth Gospel beyond debate. 
This controversy makes it expedient that we give a few 
pages to it ; and there need be but few indeed. 

The whole apparent discrepancy grows out of a con- 
fused rendering or reading of the introductory verses of 
the thirteenth chapter of John. They are as follows in 
our English version : — 

"Now, before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus 
knew that his hour was come, — that he should depart 
out of this world, — having loved his own, who were in 
the world, he loved them unto the end. And, supper be- 
ing ended, the devil having put it into the heart of Judas 
Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him, Jesus knowing that 
the Father had given all things into his hands, and that 
he was come from God and went to God, he riseth from 
supper and laid aside his garments, and took a towel and 
girded himself" (xiii. 1-4). 

Though a tolerably literal rendering, the passage as it 
stands, is obscure and ungrammatical. The important 
question is. Does the clause, " before the feast of the Pass- 
over," refer to the supper described soon after? The 
Tubingen critics say it does. Therefore it must have been 
a supper of a private nature, and not the Passover meal 
which it preceded. Therefore, according to the fourth 
Gospel, Jesus never ate the Passover at all, but only a 
private meal beforehand, and being crucified the next day, 
it must have been on Thursday, thus directly contradict- 
ing the synoptics, who make it fall on Friday. 

Plainly this is a forced construction. The clause, '* be- 
fore the feast of the Passover," does not refer to the sup- 



540 APPENDIX. 

per mentioned in the second verse, but to what imme- 
diately follows, namely, "Jesus knew that his hour was 
come." He knew it beforehand. It is in accord with all 
that he said and reiterated while in Galilee, and all the 
way thence to Jerusalem, that at the passover his hour of 
departure was to come. The whole passage, clearly ren- 
dered, is this : — 

" Now Jesus, before the feast of the Passover, knew 
that his time to pass out of this world to the Father had 
C9me, and having loved his own, who were in the world, 
he loved them to the last. And when supper was pro- 
ceeding, — the devil having put it into the heart of Judas 
Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him, — Jesus, knowing 
that the Father had given all things into his hands, and 
that he came from God and was returning to God, arose 
from supper, and, putting off his mantle, took a cloth 
and girded himself.'' 

The objection that the fourth evangelist does not say 
that this is the paschal supper, and go on to describe it 
as such, is trivial in the extreme. He is writing with the 
synoptics before him, on purpose to supplement them, 
and if he used common sense he would not tell their 
story over again. This very omission is highly signifi- 
cant. There is a tacit reference to what they had writ- 
ten, and needed not to be repeated. Still emphasizing 
the fact that Jesus had forecast the time of his death, 
and that the tender care which he had manifested for his 
own followers continued to the last, the whole passage is 
in beautiful harmony with all that precedes and follows. 
It is hardly a paraphrase to render : " Jesus knew his 
time was to come at the feast pf the Passover, long before 



APPENDIX. 541 

the time of that festival had arrived, and now that it had 
arrived, his love of his own was not remitted on account 
of his personal dangers, and so, the paschal supper being 
in progress, he even left the table to wash their feet." 

Still, if there is any possible doubt as to the meaning 
of this passage, it will vanish as we read on. The evan- 
gelist proceeds to report the discourses of Jesus with his 
disciples in the four following chapters, which the synop- 
tics had omitted entirely, but which John gives in full for 
the plain reason that they are in that high spiritual strain 
whose music touched his inmost thought, but which only 
fell on the external ear and mind of the other disciples. 
Then followed the scene in Gethsemane ; and, on the 
next morning, the trial and the crucifixion. Describing 
the latter, the fourth evangelist says, "It was toward noon 
on the Preparation of the Passover" (xix. 14). What 
was ^^ the Preparation " ? It was the day before the Jew- 
ish Sabbath, or Friday. The word was just as much 
appropriated to designate that day, as our word Saturday 
is to designate the day before Sunday. The Passover 
festival continued seven days, during which unleavened 
bread and other sacrifices beside that of the paschal lamb 
were eaten ; and the word " Passover " was used to cover 
the whole of that time ; so that Mr. Norton very prop- 
erly renders the above passage, " It was towards noon 
on the Preparation-day of passover week." Here, then, 
it is distinctly announced by the fourth evangelist that 
the crucifixion took place on Friday, in harmony with the 
synoptics, using the exact term which they employ, who 
call the Preparation ^Uhe day before the Sabbath'' See 
Mark xv. 42, compared with Matt, xxvii. 62. See also 



542 APPENDIX, 

Luke xxiii. 54, who says, speaking of the day of the cru- 
cifixion, " It was Preparation-day, and the Sabbath was 
drawing on;^^ thus making plain beyond all doubt that 
Preparation-day was Friday. 

Still the Tiibingen critics will have it that " the Prep- 
aration," as used by the fourth evangelist, means the day 
before the Passover, though without the faintest shadow 
of evidence. Pass on a little further, then, and let the 
fourth evangelist interpret himself. After Jesus had 
bowed his head and expired, the writer proceeds to say, 
the " Jews, as it was the Preparation-day, that the bodies 
might not remain on the cross during the Sabbath^ as that 
Sabbath-day was a high day, requested Pilate that their 
legs might be broken, and they be taken away" (chap, 
xix. 31). The Sabbath-day of paschal week was a great 
day, commemorated with special pomp and ceremony, 
and would be profaned by the spectacle of dead bodies 
near Jerusalem, which rendered any one who came in 
sight of them legally unclean. Therefore the execution 
is hurried through, and, because late on Friday afternoon 
the two robbers were still alive, their bodies were broken 
to hasten dissolution ; and, though Jesus was apparently 
dead, one of the soldiers pierced his side to make the 
fact perfectly sure, that the bodies might be taken down 
and put out of the way before the Sabbath drew on. 
Thus the fourth evangelist not only says that Jesus was 
put to death on Friday, but he is at pains to repeat his 
statement with circumstantial details as to how the execu- 
tion was hastened lest they should encroach on the sanc- 
tity of the Sabbath-day. 

Nor is this all. He repeats his statement yet again in 



APPENDIX, 543 

the closing verse of this same chapter, where he describes 
the removal of the body to Joseph's tomb. " There, then, 
they laid Jesus, // being the Preparation-day of the yews,^' 
If the fourth evangelist had foreseen this very controversy 
he could not have been more decisive and emphatic in 
his language, not only telling us once, but three times 
over, that Jesus was put to death on Friday, in exact 
agreement with the synoptics, furnishing minute details, 
which they had omitted, which serve for more complete 
and undoubted verification. That " the Preparation " 
meant invariably Friday, any one can abundantly verify 
from the parallel passages in the synoptics, and from 
Josephus, and from other writers, patristic and classical. 
See Norton's translation and commentary, ad. loc. The 
only other passage whicli would require elucidation is 
xviii. 28 : " Then, early in the morning they carried Je- 
sus from Caiaphas to the Praetorium. And they did not 
themselves enter the Praetorium, lest they should be de- 
filed and prevented from eating the Passover." This 
was at the trial on the morning of the day of crucifixion ; 
and, as the paschal lamb v^as always eaten the evening 
previous, it is argued that John here again makes the 
crucifixion fall on the day before the Passover. All this 
is quickly answered when we remember that '' eating the 
Passover" meant not merely the paschal lamb of the 
evening before, but also the sacrifices and unleavened 
bread of the v^^hole Passover week. 

The reader may be surprised when we say that the ob- 
jection, which these simple quotations banish clean out 
of sight, has been relied upon as the most stubborn of all 
against the genuineness of the fourth Gospel, but this is 



544 APPENDIX. 

literally true. The very flood-gates of learning have been 
opened in order to cover with darkness a subject which 
in itself seems as clear as the light of noon-day. 



B. 

THE BIRTH OF CHRIST. 



It is hardly necessary to say that the theory of evolu- 
tion given in chapter iii., Part II., is not Darwinian. 
It is Darwin's theory of " natural selection " supplemented 
as far as it consistently goes by St. George Mivart's theory 
of " derivative creation.'' The latter, however, seems to me 
to have made a very lame and imperfect use of the truth 
which he handles. He supposes that nature or the Cos- 
mos only as originally created was the immediate super- 
natural work of the Creator ; that it had certain tenden- 
cies impressed upon it to be unfolded within it, such as 
tendencies to develop new species at certain times and 
eras. A clock-maker so constructs his time -piece that 
at certain hours the hammer will strike from one up to 
twelve successively without any foreign interference. So 
God made and superintends his Cosmos, but does not 
work immediately in it. But in due time a human body 
was evolved out of this Cosmical machine, with lower 
organizations for a basis ; the original tendencies work- 
ing upward till they produced a human form ; or to keep 
to our illustration, the clock kept striking more and more 
till it struck the hour of noon. At this signal the Creator 
interferes. The Cosmos, though by its inherent power 



APPENDIX, 545 

it could evolve a human body, could not put an immortal 
soul into it. Here the Creator comes in immediately and 
supernatural ly, breathes a soul into the body, and so man 
appears on the earth. But why not acknowledge that 
God is immanent and inter working in his Cosmos as well 
as overlooking it ; that He not only created it once but 
creates it freshly every day and hour ? That done there 
are no difficulties in the theory of evolution, and Darwin- 
ism is supplemented by the only truth that can give it 
philosophic wholeness and consistency. "Natural selec- 
tion " accounts for change of species within a certain 
range, but it breaks down when we apply it universally, 
as St. George Mivart clearly shows. It cannot pass the 
line between the animal, and the immortal being we call 
man, neither can it evolve the animal from the plant, nor 
the vegetable kingdom from the mineral without the ac- 
knowledgment of an immanent creative force acting in- 
telligently, though acting through natural laws. Natural 
paternity only produces its kind, and when a higher king- 
dom of nature is evolved from a lower one, we must be- 
lieve in the immanence of a power higher than either, or 
else break the continuity of rational thought. 

The doctrine of the supernatural birth of Christ is 
placed on ground independent of all these analogies. 
They are only referred to for the purpose of showing the 
impotence of objections from mere naturalism, since nat- 
uralism cannot account for the original birth of man with- 
out acknowledgment of an immediate higher paternity. 
We receive the doctrine of the birth of Christ as given by 
the evangelic narratives, not merely because they have 
declared it, but because with the other facts of his life it 
35 



546 APPENDIX. 

makes a seamless, complete, and consistent whole. We 
understand Christ himself to claim it. See Matt. xxii. 
41-45- 



C. 

THE PREEXISTENCE. 



Mr. Norton renders John viii. 28 : " Before Abraham 
was born I was he.'' Undoubtedly the words admit of 
this rendering as an instance where the present tense is 
used for the past. But the common usage requires that 
k-^fsi elfjLL should be rendered " I am," and by this render- 
ing we think the significance of the passage is more com- 
pletely given, though the difference would not affect in the 
least any theological doctrine which the text might be 
supposed to teach. If we supply the ellipsis by the pro- 
noun " he " the question immediately returns, What is its 
antecedent ? Plainly, " the Son " or " the Son of Man," 
occurring in immediate connection, — terms which Jesus 
used invariably in his colloquies with the Jews in the 
fourth Gospel, and which almost as invariably raised 
against him the charge of blasphemy. For the emphasis 
is always on the article. It is f/ie Son, or the on/y Son. 
It is son ship in a sense that applies to him exclusively 
that Jesus here affirms. Not less than nine times in this 
same eighth chapter, and in this same conversation, Jesus 
asserts this sonship, by calling God ''my Father," or by 
calling himself ''the Son." In verse 28 he tells them, 
** When ye have lifted up the Son of Man, then shall ye 



APPENDIX, 547 

know that I am," that is, that I am the Son of Man. In 
verse 25 they ask him to supply the ellipsis himself, which 
he does. He had told them, " If ye believe not that I am, 
ye shall die in your sins." " That you are who .? " they 
ask him. " The same that I said unto you from the begin- 
ningr What had he called himself from the beginning ? 
If the reader will turn back he will see. In the conversa- 
tion with Nicodemus he calls himself the only begotten 
Son of God ^' (iii. 16-18). In chapter fifth this sonship 
is asserted not less than eight times, so that the Jews 
seek to kill him because he made himself equal with God 
(tcrov kavTov iroiOyv rw ©cw). As Son of God he had abrogated 
the Sabbath, and annulled the law of Moses, thus arrogat- 
ing to himself, they thought, the prerogatives of Jehovah. 
The reader need not be told that this charge in its very 
nature is of blasphemy, even were it not called so after- 
ward, as it is twice over. It was punishable with death 
by stoning under the Jewish law (see Lev. xxiv. 16). 
This was at the second visit of Jesus to the Capitol after 
entering on his mission, and it was the standing accusa- 
tion against him to the close, invariably for calling him- 
self the Son of God, or Son of Man. Through five suc- 
cessive scenes the charge comes up when they seek to 
kill him. It came up at the fourth visit to Jerusalem 
(see John x. 33). It came up at the mock trial before 
the High Priest, who shook his robe saying, " He hath 
spoken blasphemy," because he had called himself " the 
Son of Man " (Matt xxvi. 64). It came up before Pilate, 
where the Jews refer to their law requiring death "be- 
cause he made himself the Son of God." 

There can be no shadow of doubt, therefore, as to how 



548 APPENDIX, 

the ellipsis should be supplied in John viii. 58, or how 
John himself must have understood it who reports the 
words. He opens his Gospel by calling the Word made 
flesh, which was " in the beginning/' " the only begotten 
of the Father," and " the only begotten Son of God.'' He 
reports Jesus as saying the same of himself, twice in the 
identical words of " only begotten Son/' always in terms 
that involve that meaning. He had been saying it all 
through the preceding chapters, and nine times in this 
same eighth chapter^ which led on to the declaration in 
verse 58, and he lay under the charge of blasphemy for say- 
ing it. It should read then " Before Abraham was born, I 
am the Son of God," or " I am the only begotten of the 
Father." They took up stones^ and we cannot mistake as 
to what the accusation was. AVe come to the same result, 
by rendering in the past tense " From before the birth of 
Abraham I have been the only begotten of the Father," 
referring us directly to the Proem where " the Word " 
who was "from the Beginning," is "the only begotten 
Son." I have kept, however, to the rendering in the pres- 
ent tense, because the Eternal Word from which Jesus 
speaks, and which, as bread from heaven he calls himself^ 
is timeless, and it seems to me that this is intimated in 
the text. 

I can but notice here a common humanitarian argu- 
ment, that the divinity of Christ is like that of other men 
because it is " derived." If we keep to the royal image 
of the Johannean writings, we shall see that this argument 
has no force. The Word which became incarnate in 
Christ, which is God speaking, or, in the act of self-reve- 
lation, is called " Light," " the Light which coming into 



APPENDIX, 549 

the world enlightens every man." So Christ as this Word 
calls himself " the Light of the World." In the Apoca- 
lypse his face is as " the Sun," and in heaven " the Lamb 
is the Light thereof." The Word is all that by which 
God is known or shines forth, whether in nature, in man, 
or supremely in Christ. The Word on the bosom of the 
Father, ever begotten from the depths of his love, is -as 
the photosphere on the sun's disc, ever born of the solar 
fire, or if you will, forever derived or given from the solar 
deeps, without which the sun would be an invisible mass 
in the heavens, but by which he fills the universe with 
life and light. It no less belongs to the sun and is part 
of it from being " derived^ The image gives us the con- 
ception of the Divine Being, as not a bare point or dead 
unity, but a Divine Organism which has eternal life and 
interaction in itself, even as the human being, God's im- 
age, has interaction in himself, with one power in deriva- 
tion from another. Keep clearly to the royal image itself, 
and there is no confusion of thought in calling the Logos 
both essentially divine, and only begotten ; nor is there 
any solecism in the language of the church, such as 
" eternal Son," or, "very God of very God," for the words 
do not mean that there are two Gods, but that God and 
his Logos are consubstantial. To say that all power in 
heaven and earth is " given " by one being to another^ as 
if one person could confer omnipotence on another per- 
son, is gross solecism of language. To say that God 
could have an only Son, in any itatural sense, " first born 
of the whole creation," yet not appearing till four thou- 
sand years after the creation, is most absurd anachronism. 
But all this disappears when we think of the Divine Be- 



550 APPENDIX. 

ing, neither as a bare point of unity, nor a stagnant deep, 
but having eternal activities within himself, a Living God, 
the motions of whose nature all this imagery serves to 
shadow forth. For a mortal man, or for an archangel as 
well, to announce that God is greater than he is, were 
profane egoism. But for Jesus speaking as the Word to 
say, "my Father is greater than I," is to say only that 
God as absolute, is more than God revealed. 



D. 

PERSONALITY AND PERSONIFICATION. 

In this treatise we have regarded the Logos as personi- 
fied. If our work were not expository rather than philo- 
sophical or ontological, it would require a dissertation on 
the distinction between personality and personification. 
Though the Word in the New Testament is personified, it: 
is none the less regarded as hypostatized. It is not an 
abstract noun ; not like human speech, something which 
can be broken off from the speaker and become dead 
letter. The divine substance is in it continuous and un- 
broken, though it is not a person exterior to God. Ix ^ » 
that in which the One Divine Person is always revealed. 
Personality involves essentially the idea of Will or self 
conscious volition. Assuming that there are three per- 
sons in the Godhead, or three self-conscious Wills, is pre- 
cisely where Trinitarianism breaks up in Tritheism ; though 
as shown in the text there are forms of Trinitarianism which 



APPENDIX. 551 

drop the word ^' persons " and avoid this danger. While 
the New Testament formula of Father, Son, and Spirit, 
declares three essentials of the Divine Being, we construe 
it in harmony with the strictest and purest monotheism. 
The Word and the Spirit may be separately personified^ 
and are in the New Testament \ but the moment we think 
of them as separate persons and not co-essentials of one 
Person, we have lost the Divine Unity, and are in the 
worship of three Gods. The debate of fifteen centuries 
has shown no possible escape from this alternative. 



I 



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